It is true older browsers had partially hardcoded presentation so you couldn't always override the default CSS of certain elements (table elments and form controls were especially notorious for hardcoded presentation). But I believe this is not an issue in modern browsers.
I think the last browser that saw widespread use in any market with that issue was NN4. In some markets, Opera [some version; 7?] with the same issue will have been a problem much later than NN4. Really, this is to say: this hasn't been a concern for well over a decade at this point even with fairly generous browser support matrices.
In the MySQL monitor, you can terminate a statement with ; for tabular view, or with \G for a linear view that represents each row as a key-value list. This is super useful for reading wide rows in narrow terminals. I can very easily see the appeal of doing the same for wide tables on narrow displays.
First to come to mind: A table with many rows displayed on a tiny mobile screen. The most common solution is to let the table overflow horizontally. There are other complex solutions, most of them fall in the CSS-Hack category.
In this case, to have a CSS table that can be something else on a tiny screen (via media queries) may lead to a successful UX solution.