The author is arguing for semantic markup, but prior to HTML5 the concept barely existed. Everything was kludged together. Site layouts were tables. Later divs/spans ruled. Eventually sanity reigned and semantic elements were introduced.
So while I don't disagree with what they're saying, the title is a bit of a misnomer.
>[Don't] create tables built out of custom div elements
Tables aren't responsive. Those fancy div tables are used because they work better on mobile. With a splash of JS (or overly-clever CSS) you can also introduce interactivity, tabbed layouts, etc.
Unless dealing with a very small amount of tabular data, it's really hard to recommend tables anymore.
Otherwise, yeah, fair advice. Nothing really too controversial in there.
HTML5 was honestly the opposite. XHTML and XHTML2 were born of a desire to have stricter, more semantic markup. But we live in the shitty timeline where XHTML2 died and we got HTML5 instead.
Semantic HTML was already fashionable in late 2004, when I was a graphic designer arguing against table tags. But my own exposure is a bad measure, just as is anyone else's. One of the most famous groups pushing for well-written HTML was WaSP, and it turns out that it was founded in 1998, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project
So while I don't disagree with what they're saying, the title is a bit of a misnomer.
>[Don't] create tables built out of custom div elements
Tables aren't responsive. Those fancy div tables are used because they work better on mobile. With a splash of JS (or overly-clever CSS) you can also introduce interactivity, tabbed layouts, etc.
Unless dealing with a very small amount of tabular data, it's really hard to recommend tables anymore.
Otherwise, yeah, fair advice. Nothing really too controversial in there.