The author is arguing for semantic markup, but prior to HTML5 the concept barely existed. Everything was kludged together. Site layouts were tables. Later divs/spans ruled. Eventually sanity reigned and semantic elements were introduced.

So while I don't disagree with what they're saying, the title is a bit of a misnomer.

>[Don't] create tables built out of custom div elements

Tables aren't responsive. Those fancy div tables are used because they work better on mobile. With a splash of JS (or overly-clever CSS) you can also introduce interactivity, tabbed layouts, etc.

Unless dealing with a very small amount of tabular data, it's really hard to recommend tables anymore.

Otherwise, yeah, fair advice. Nothing really too controversial in there.