"table" was never deprecated in HTML at all, but was discouraged for general layout (we were aware of this even in the early 2000s). But for representing tabular data - like... data in rows/columns from spreadsheets (with column headers and such)... HTML tables were absolutely the right (only?) way to present this.
I was at that company less than a year...
Best case I'm hoping it's because they were required to get an exact design, but they really should have pushed back on that one if so.
Just use <a> please :)
Seems to me that we have redundant mechanisms for specifying semantics: tags and attributes (and classes as a specific attribute). Seems to me that tags are really just syntactic sugar for things like roles. Tables in particular are easily abused.
Of course I use the tag names, because they're idiomatic. But I feel like a newbie who identifies divs as the only true structure builder has a proper developer's intuition for separating presentation from content.
As long as you think about semantics and accessibility and does the extra work to add those things, then not really.
But why add those extra things when we already get those for free by doing <h1> and then customizing the style? Everything you'd need to manually add, automatically works fine then, so seems like a no-brainer to avoid putting more work on your table.
