Making the table responsive while there are hardcoded html tags would be hell compared to media queries in css (grid).

In the early days, all you needed is one layout, and seeing the structure of your html tags was intuitive.

Today, you use "table" tags for mainly tables and css for layouts. Separate of concerns?

Grid is much more powerful than the table.

Not as many viewports to support back then. Look at the hacks we used to get tables to be responsive over a decade ago: https://css-tricks.com/responsive-data-tables/

Using tables was hell compared to Grid. First time I've seen this described as "good."