The closing paragraph is the nicest part of the article, mentioning the benefits of legibility.
I never disliked the mechanics of html table based layouts, col and row spans, what wasn't so nice was the attribute soup. That made reading the outlines of the html hard.
Back in the day we had tools like Dreamweaver, that had a visual design mode. It was quirky so people resorted to programming html in text editors. What's a real shame is that there wasn't a tool that matured to the point, where you could do a little of both.
The most interesting part about a website for me, is usually the content, and the rest is pretty much guff. The nicest thing about simple authoring is that it allows the on-boarding of everyone. Not just arty or programming types. This is why Facebook in part took off. Because it made publishing easy. Weeks, months and even years of development just to get to the point of publishing is rather wasteful. Many sites could simply use a template product.
Review the end result. Many web sites still just look not much more than, erm, web sites. And many don't work, or even convey or make the information that you simply want to consume easy to find and digest.
Loads of technology is thrown at problem, where a simple site map and text based content will suffice. And if a business isn't reactive to customer requests, or doesn't update relevant content - then a site becomes quite superfluous or even a liability.