It's a great question yet here's the truth there was a proposal for layout used for tables. It wasn't included in the spec. There was a period of time where they could be used if linearized to make beautiful logical and more accessible than now. Was hacking floats better?

Bert's work on CSS grid was awesome. No, there was no conspiracy, but a big confusion about what "semantics" meant and at times even whether it was a worthy goal.

Bert always did awesome work and was a strong promoter of the keeping things clean and is declarative meaningful syntactically and likely semantic but most of what's happening now outside of specific use is just too much and the Cascade is hated who needs it when you have in line

Perhaps rules should have cascaded, not individual properties (XSLT got that part right). Or possibly entire rulesets. When Webheads talk about semantics i can ask them to find all poems on the Web written by a particular author, whose second verse mentions trees.