You are probably remembering advice from the dark age of IE6 dominance where display:table was not well supported. I have also seen advice againt using html tab

You are probably remembering advice from the dark age of IE6 dominance where display:table was not well supported. I have also seen advice againt using html tables in the early days of mobile browsers since they handled them badly. The problem is people forget context. The advice “dont use tables <in this specific context under these specific constraints>” is remembered as “tables are bad, never use tables or anything which remotely looks like a table”.