The reason for the advice against tables was that the "semantic web" was all the rage (probably mostly because Google wanted to make it easier to index stuff). If you have tabular data, using tables was just fine. The issue was with using it solely to control the graphical presentation without any semantic basis for putting it in the table. Same reason you don't use <H1> just to make the text bigger.
>The issue was with using it solely to control the graphical presentation without any semantic basis for putting it in the table.
There shouldn't be any semantic basis needed.
HTML is not a semantic data exchange format, was not designed to be (the pathetic handful of semantic HTML5 tags added to be used ad-hoc included), and it inevitably includes content, style, and behavior (js).
The semantics should belong to data intergchanged (and storage format), and the reusability should be on the data storage/query backend, not to the markup language.
Adding semantics to the markup duplicates the semantics already present in your DB or JSON API scheme or query server/storage in general.
