There were always tradeoffs involved. A site might be legally required to be accessible, or it may be a business decision. Layouts hacked together with floats w

There were always tradeoffs involved. A site might be legally required to be accessible, or it may be a business decision. Layouts hacked together with floats were a mess to create and maintain, but tended to adapt better to mobile displays. A competent front-end developer should understand pros and cons and be able to handle both approaches. Even today you might have to support old internet explorer, so you cant use display:grid. Of course incompetence can be present on either side of the table in interviews. I have heard about people avoiding display:table in CSS because they heard tables were bad.