> Amusingly, tables came back. But they're called "layout tables" now, to avoid embarrassment.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. Tables were bad because they were too rigid and weren't designed for layout purposes; they do still get used when you want to display an actual table. Maybe you meant CSS Grid?
> Trying to do 2D layout with 1D constructs (the "float" and "clear" era) was just silly.
The float era was certainly a dark time, and I'm glad I came into the field on the tail end of it. It was a hold-over from CSS' document-focused origins. Today we have flex-box, which quite elegantly serves 90% of people's layout needs, and CSS Grid which fills in the rest. For the record, flex-box is a 1D construct for doing 2D layouts, and it does the job fantastically.
Your Autodesk comparison belies a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the DOM - it is, to its great advantage, a 1D space which flows into a 2D shape. In fact, this was the great flaw with using tables for layout in the first place. By making the content fundamentally 2D, all it could do to respond to different screen sizes and different browser window resizes is stretch. But you don't actually want your layout to be totally percentage-based. You want your content to wrap and flow to make the best use of the available space that it can, with no assumptions about screen size or ratio. The web is 1D because text is 1D. As text flows in lines, within containers which may be different shapes and sizes, so does the entire document model. This is profoundly powerful. Modern CSS gives you the tools to make select aspects of your layout work differently - yes, even in 2D ways - but they're best used to shape and guide that fundamental flow instead of replacing it.