Answer 1

Not really. There are a lot of elements that behave the same regardless if they're different elements, for instance: div, section, aside and nav (Probably theres more) are the same. This means you can put your navigation list in any if those.
Sometimes HTML projects' elements end up too loaded with attributes, so you might struggle to find the id of your elements to see what they are, if you use the nav tag for your navigation, you just look at the tag name, it's more like an emblematic purpose