People were doing things like making rounded buttons using tables, using things self-described as "clever hacks", and they mostly stopped working because as things like new viewport dimensions showed up you needed to paper over that too.
at least from what i've seen, the other strength of CSS is that it gets used for literally everything and so it's possible to build most conceivable layouts. A lot of the other layout frameworks either just use CSS, or you might run into edge cases because of the sheer amount of things in CSS that may not be well supported elsewhere or do not have a clear parallel.