And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long time.

I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, I despise CSS the most.

It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am not going to learn this."

It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, etc) was worse than tables, I thought.

Early CSS had a huge problem with this.

"Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.

> "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message.

It was, but in hindsight maybe the message needed to be elaborated more. Perhaps it should've been "Don't use tables for layout, use CSS!"

Besides that, CSS IMO accelerated more complex and visually pleasing websites, and arguably spurned on the Web 2.0 look. Unfortunately, due to the message not specifying the for layout bit, it took a while for many devs to unlearn that tables are bad – tables aren't, they should just be used for tabular data.

But this was exactly the problem. They said "don't use tables", but then didn't have anything that could do what you could do easily with tables. Instead you got many hours of arcane and confusing combinations of float: and clear: tags. Especially if you were trying to avoid absolute positioning and wanted the page to be responsive.

Yep, it was absurd. I remember spending hours fighting with CSS to do something that would've taken 5 minutes with tables. Maybe I was just bad at it.

I feel quite the opposite now, a table feels like so much typing compared to a quick flexbox layout. Even when I legitimately need a table, I dread it.

If Flexbox had been in CSS from the start I think people would have a far more favorable view of CSS.