A few weeks ago I found a StackExchange thread where someone had benchmarked the two approaches and found, that table tags were somehow optimized. However, this

A few weeks ago I found a StackExchange thread where someone had benchmarked the two approaches and found, that table tags were somehow optimized. However, this was tested with identical content and with a table for which every cell had to be rendered. In other scenarios, the performance might be different, but for spreadsheets, this should be applicable. Sadly I can't find the link at the moment (was on a different PC).