Tables are better as well in the sense that they are a higher level representation than divs. The problem was that people were then using tables as a way to layout pages rather than to use them to display tabular data.
I think it is deeper, the problem is that HTML tables are serialized in row and columns separately, so for example if you wanted a cell to be 2 rows tall and 2 columns wide there wasn't a local change that could allow it.
To my understanding CSS Grid is meant to solve this
