What, no? I did a lot of web development in those days and read a lot of blogs. You just needed to filter out anyone who was obviously over-opinionated and lacked any nuance. Most pragmatic people used tables and didn't feel guilty about it. If you delivered working software with a decent UX, why on earth would you care what some shouty internet person said??
Oof - I didn't know that. Kind of a weird requirement, were/are screen readers rendered so ineffective by the content being in a table as opposed to in divs?
Not inneffective as such, it just presented a confusing user experience because the screen reader would assume the table represented data structured in two dimensions and e.g present navigation options for going cellwise left/right and up/down.
This would be pretty confusing if the table was just used to create a margin and most cells only contained spacer gifs. Especially with deeply nested tables (as was the fashion at the time) it could be pretty confusing.
Today you can just add an ARIA-hint indicating a html table is used purely for layout and a screen reader can then treat it just as divs. But this did not exist at the time.
Of course the WCAG just assumed it was not a big deal to avoid tables for layout since CSS2 supported tabular layout through pure CSS. But the reality of a web dominated by IE6 made this a much larger problem.
What, no? I did a lot of web development in those days and read a lot of blogs. You just needed to filter out anyone who was obviously over-opinionated and lacked any nuance. Most pragmatic people used tables and didn't feel guilty about it. If you delivered working software with a decent UX, why on earth would you care what some shouty internet person said??