CSS, as in "CSS evangelists", influential web designers, guidelines in web development resources, books, and so on, recommended and advocated for the use of clear/float.
You might not have been there, but float layout was a big thing back then, and everybody was guilt-pressured to use that - neither tables, nor "display: table" (which was used by some, but also discouraged).
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”.
'display: table' wasn't consistently supported and '<table>' for layout caused issues for screen readers because they (rightfully) expected content that's tabular in nature.
Nobody was guilt-pressured into using floats. You might say some were guilt-pressured into writing accessible web sites but that is a significant destinction. Many public/government web sites were mandated by law to be accessible, so many developers had to write accessible html whether they liked it or not.
Of course for your personal Tranformers fan site you can use html tables to your hearts desire. Nobody is likely to complain.
But most web-design focused media is targeted professionals for whom it is a necesssary skill to be able to design pages which look good for most users and is accessible. During the dark age of IE6 it was necessary for developers to know and use a large array of hacks (including the abuse of floats) to achive this.
What, no? I did a lot of web development in those days and read a lot of blogs. You just needed to filter out anyone who was obviously over-opinionated and lacked any nuance. Most pragmatic people used tables and didn't feel guilty about it. If you delivered working software with a decent UX, why on earth would you care what some shouty internet person said??
Oof - I didn't know that. Kind of a weird requirement, were/are screen readers rendered so ineffective by the content being in a table as opposed to in divs?
Not inneffective as such, it just presented a confusing user experience because the screen reader would assume the table represented data structured in two dimensions and e.g present navigation options for going cellwise left/right and up/down.
This would be pretty confusing if the table was just used to create a margin and most cells only contained spacer gifs. Especially with deeply nested tables (as was the fashion at the time) it could be pretty confusing.
Today you can just add an ARIA-hint indicating a html table is used purely for layout and a screen reader can then treat it just as divs. But this did not exist at the time.
Of course the WCAG just assumed it was not a big deal to avoid tables for layout since CSS2 supported tabular layout through pure CSS. But the reality of a web dominated by IE6 made this a much larger problem.
CSS, as in "CSS evangelists", influential web designers, guidelines in web development resources, books, and so on, recommended and advocated for the use of clear/float.
You might not have been there, but float layout was a big thing back then, and everybody was guilt-pressured to use that - neither tables, nor "display: table" (which was used by some, but also discouraged).