Or the rare-in-the-wild but somewhat funky method of using the display: table/table-row/table-cell CSS declarations to create table-based designs, but applied to different tags so at least your HTML still only shows those fancy modern divs :)

I had an internship during college at a small web shop that did a ton of HTML mail. Early on, after I had completed a project, they took a half day to try and teach me how floats worked.

Note: If you think web browsers are weird, just wait until you try doing things in email clients or - $deity forbid - ebook readers.

As you say, it was weird and initially quite difficult to wrap my head around it. Surprisingly, I didn't actually learn about the "clearfix" hack until a couple of years later when I interviewed for a Front-End job at - of all places - Fox News.

The person who I talked with there gave me a take-home to work on and send back. Tl;dr I didn't get it quite right because I hadn't really taken the time to understand what the particular styles did to the layout.

Fast-forward to today and I'm using floats w/ @print and a div class of "clearfix" set to "both" in order to reset the layout of a document that was converted from Word's .docx to HTML.

How times change.

The era between tables and flexbox/grid were the glory years of Bootstrap and Foundation CSS frameworks.