And this is an advantage over plain old HTML how? Did people for get HTML exists and can be used without all this fluff?
Html elements on their own, however, are not capable of sorting, filtering, grouping, selection, nested header generation, (insert any feature from React Table here), let alone making all of those things perform well together.
https://github.com/tannerlinsley/react-table#features
So the comparison to HTML tables is a bit odd, because (as per the article linked by OP) it does pretty much everything except the UI part.
(I'm not the author, I just use this library at my work.)
Filtering, sorting, collapsing, etc. Can’t do any of that with plain HTML. And if the rest of your app is React, trying to integrate something non-React is just a headache.
Well, you can if you reload the page from the backend for each of those operations. Like we did in the 00s.
Adding the “sortable” class to a <table> element provides support for sorting by column value. Clicking the column headers will sort the table rows by that column’s value. Tables must use <thead> and <th> tags for sortable functionality to work.