I do a lot of web design and you often have to use table for compatibility reasons or straight up no other way is supported (vertical alignment or same height for example, even if flexbox does it now IE 8 doesn't support it)
These days you can use CSS 'display: table;' if you still need the table layout engine and don't want to use a non-semantic table tag. It's supported in ie 8+. If you're still supporting ie7... well, I feel bad for you :)
ES2016 is proposed to be based on Ecmarkup, a more modern system which will let us collaborate on Github more easily, rather than a canonical MS Word document on the editor's computer.