This reminded me of a web dev competition's task I saw once where the instructions said both "Always use semantic HTML for proper accessibility" and "In this ex

This reminded me of a web dev competition's task I saw once where the instructions said both "Always use semantic HTML for proper accessibility" and "In this exercise, you must create the table using grid and flexbox". I thought that was weird, but now I think you might be right - if you use <table> and add display: grid to it then it might preserve the default role="row" and similar accessibility things.