@JMMaok

If that is your only visual clue I would agree, but I would presume that there are other design features that indicate how a heading or title is related to the content it refers to.

I made a quick sketch to explain.

In the attached sketch there are three articles but one is displayed as a featured article and the title of that article is visually displayed in a larger font.

If in this case the site title is chosen to be h1 then each of those three article titles would be h2, regardless of their visual size on screen. From the design, it is clear which content element each article refers to.

Moving on to the footer of the site, I have drawn 4 sections, or columns, with 3 links each. The heading of each of those sections is visually smaller than any of the article titles. But in this specific example they would be h2 headings as well, or the hierarchical structure would be off. If in the code they were h3 or h4, they would be interpreted as belonging to article 3, as they would then be subheadings under that article.

But I doubt that anyone looking at this page would interpret the footer headings to be subheadings of article 3, even if they are smaller than that heading. Similarly, the two articles in the center of the page are not easily interpreted as being part of article 1, even if the title fonts of article 2 and article 3 are smaller. The overall visual cues tell the whole story. The code should tell the same story.