"Made life a lot easier" wasn't my experience. I always found early CSS much more fiddly than tables, and less capable in many ways.

It's funny looking back at this SO question from 2009, and its answers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426253/why-use-tables-to...

There was definitely an ongoing culture war between people who felt like using tables was not "proper", and people who just wanted their site layout to work consistently in IE6.