I think part of the reason tables became considered "bad" was that back at that time most web pages were built by interspersed HTML and ASP or PHP code and getting all the TR and TD tags balanced especially with rowspans or colspans thrown in quickly became a mess. Every page was a standalone thing also, it was much less common to see templating systems used to establish the overall structure of the site. So if you ever got the assignment to "reskin" a website, it was a huge amount of very tedious work making repeated similar changes to all the tables and other markup on every page.

Today we have much better ways to create an overall layout and separate markup from content. Using tables today would be a lot less of a problem than it was when they were decreed to be "bad."

An important reason that table based layouts became obsolete in HTML is because the way table cells are rendered is not the same as how `div`s are rendered. It's shockingly difficult to get a table cell to keep a consistent size. This makes some sense if you're using it as a simple data container, but doesn't work at all if you're trying to use it as a generic content container the way we use `div`s

Also, if by "bizarrely named divs" you mean things like "section", "article", "header", "footer", etc., I have to disagree; I think these are a huge improvement in terms of readability and allowing a developer to communicate the intended purpose and structure of the code, and they offer significant advantages in accessibility as well. You ask me, the semantic web is a wonderful thing