Did front-end dev (among other things) for half of the 2000s (and beyond) and heard plenty of arguments about semantic markup, flexible restyling, accessibility, separation of concerns, and more.

But not one about extra lines of code when it came to table layout.

And claiming non-table alternatives always needed polyfills and more code doesn’t sound like an accurate reflection of the time either. It sounds more like resentment of people who actually did invest in understanding of the domain because they might not just let you use the small toolset you knew without thinking about anything else.

And I say that as a person who did a lot of table-layout markup too.