That makes it super easy to author state machines using Excel with arbitrary data per state. Super useful and provided a great way for designers to do the game logic in Excel while I focused on the physics or whatever else.
It was also orders of magnitude faster than any other format the studio was using for data - XML was truly disasterously awful, but even decent formats would be doing parsing, translating, copying and memory allocation per node from whatever file format they were using. Compare that to a table that is ready to go in memory after a single fread().
I still wouldn't call it Table Oriented Programming, nor suggested that it is somehow opposed to Object Oriented Programming, but I do have experience to back up how some of the ideas in this article are good.