"But the shit ton of semantically meaningless divs that are sprinkled around the structure to provide hooks for CSS declarations in the 'usual' style of doing layouts is somehow better?"

No, it's not, as I thought I made plainly clear in my comment. HTML5 introduced a smorgasbord of new tags to avoid that.

You're right that a lot of modern web development fashion is silly, but there are alternatives besides just sticking to tables for everything.