What we were reproaching to the <table> tag was to be wrong on the semantic side.
If you use divs and style them with display:table I see absolutely nothing wrong here, semantic is right, you infer the display behaviour through css.
I can understand the argument that "you should put styling into an external css so you can just change it in one place rather than throughout the code". However that argument doesn't apply to many use-cases.
Part of the madness was due to tools that auto generated attributes and browser implementations when repainting/reflow occurred.
If the time, and potential knowledge was there, to better organize the structure vs. the layout thing may have been different. We would probably still be wrestling with browser issues.
I have worked in places where corporate sites had tables were littered with font tags for each cell, littered with a half dozen iframes(!?!)
The use for tables in layout was easy, but the long term debt was never paid.
Granted this is less of a case now; wading through this was not fun.
It's simple as that: if you don't have to (e-mails) do not use inline CSS. Never, ever. And the same goes for <table>. It will actually save you a lot of work.
For example, I have a page that uses html5 to draw a playback progress bar. The canvas tag has an inline style giving the width and height. If I put this in an external css it would mean I would have to either create a new css page, or put it into an existing page (and then put a comment in the css saying which file it was for). Thus the html is larger in total, possibly more files to download, more files to maintain, and if you want to tweak the layout you have to hunt in the css for it (rather than it being right there).
In cases like this where it is a single tag, using inline styles just simplifies development and maintenance with no downside.
And adding a single comment line in addition to your style sheet isn't exactly going to break the bank.
What if your client comes back to you in a few weeks/months and says "I want another playback progress bar on another page"?
And we all bought into it, well most of us. Every time an overzealous developer would spot the use of a table tag, hell would reign down upon Earth lambasting the developer for using a table, even if it was being used for the right purpose. "how dare you use a table you noob, use floats and DIV's, they are so much better" - for a good while people were hating on using the table tag to the point where many were hating it, but could not really tell you why other than, "because tables are bad"
In many ways the web has gone full circle, Flexbox is merely a more powerful CSS version of tables, in-fact there are many similarities like the ability to have columns of content of varied size sitting alongside one another. We added in a new set of properties, changed the name and made them a little bit more powerful.
I am one of those developers who have been quietly using display table for non-tabular data for a while now to solve issues I have seen other developers resort to additional markup and CSS hacks for, that either makes me a lazy developer, an efficient developer or perhaps both.
Just recently I proved a remote developer wrong in regards to responsive tables. He tried telling me and the business responsive tables cannot be done without hacks. I implemented a solution using display table and DIV's. This is for part of an app that only logged in users see, not search engines, so while it was not a true proper use of the properties, it allowed me to implement a true responsive solution for tables that will not degrade SEO or performance, as it is not public.
Simply using media queries I was able to make my table DIV's collapse by setting them to display block, adding in some type and colour adjustments, and it just worked. No need to use before and after pseudo selectors to hack in support for titles and stacked tables. No hair pulling when the business asked me to support IE9 either.
As developers we all mostly want to do everything correctly and use the proper tags and CSS properties in the appropriate way, but sometimes when you have a deadline to meet and time is running out, you have to do what you have to do to get things done.