Layout tables were never a serious problem for screen readers, this has always been overblown. Screen readers adopted working heuristics to distinguish between layout and data tables early on, because tables were used for layout almost from the beginning (as soon as it was possible to remove the visible borders).

See for example WebAIM https://webaim.org/techniques/tables/: “It is sometimes suggested, even by some accessibility advocates, that layout tables are bad for accessibility. In reality, layout tables do not pose inherent accessibility issues.”