My experience was the opposite: I picked up HTML-based web design quite easily, but when CSS came along, it was so finicky that I was never able to make it reliably do what I wanted. Everything seemed to be connected to everything else by invisible springs, so that if you breathed on one thing a little funny, something unwanted would happen somewhere else. I ended up abandoning web design altogether rather than continue fighting with CSS.
With traditional HTML layout, I could just write out a document, and reasonably expect that it would come out looking right: but using CSS was a frustrating, trial-and-error process, where it was often easier to change my design to fit what the CSS was willing to do than to suffer along, wrestling with endless side-effects, trying to make something happen that would have been easy with tables.
"I picked up HTML-based web design quite easily, but when CSS came along, it was so finicky that I was never able to make it reliably do what I wanted. "
That is true. It's easy to learn. It's easy to get to do straight-forward things. It's too unpredictable in many, use cases where an alternative layout might be used. However, those required actual programming on top of executing, third-party code.
They went with usually easy and safe for better or worse.
With traditional HTML layout, I could just write out a document, and reasonably expect that it would come out looking right: but using CSS was a frustrating, trial-and-error process, where it was often easier to change my design to fit what the CSS was willing to do than to suffer along, wrestling with endless side-effects, trying to make something happen that would have been easy with tables.