I don’t think it was that tables were bad. They were too formulaic and too strict and it was hard to do something that would stand out.
With CSS it wasn’t dumping problem on the others, it was giving the freedom. Problem with freedom is that it is never free and you also have to fix additional problems that come with it.
The problem I see with using tables for layout is that it fucks up the semantic meaning of the html file.
But that was an issue of philosophy that got trumped by practical needs.
However, nowadays we have css grids with template areas. So we can just write our HTML semantically correct as if it was more or less just about the content (as it should be IMHO) and still move things around using CSS depending on the type of device, size of screen, media used.
So the holy grail in my opinion is to write HTML that contains only content and metadata and next to no elements or attributes that are needed purely for semantically irrelevant layout and styling purposes — and then do all the layout and styling in CSS. Styling tags like <em> or the occasional <section class="notice"> are okay, one should never be too strict with such ideals.
The advantage here is that this provides the maximum decoupling between the content and the layout/styling which not only helps with future layout updates, but improves the accessability of the page.
One thing I also seem to remember from the very old days, was that browsers wouldn't render the table until it was completely downloaded. So if your whole content was in a table, there would be nothing to see until the whole page was loaded and it could do the layout. But without tables you would see parts pop in as it was loaded.
I've seriously considered doing websites in pdf too but still have to run into a situation dramatic enough for it to be worth it. Now that I think about it again "installing" a pdf on a pc could cover a lot of app like functionality. Most important is to make it as convenient as possible to remember your business exists and interact with it.
active (PDF) documents seem to have become a thing on eReaders, especially pen-based ones; mostly they leverage clever linking and bookmarking, and not much more, though.
With CSS it wasn’t dumping problem on the others, it was giving the freedom. Problem with freedom is that it is never free and you also have to fix additional problems that come with it.