In my somewhat limited experience with FO, I've resorted to tables a few
times. I can justify it to myself by looking at the source of a PDF and
noting that there isn't really any semantic value in there to begin
with, so using a table for layout doesn't make it much worse. It does
make me cringe on a philosophical level though.

They'd probably have avoided some pain by naming it "grid" instead
of "table." After all, it's a "block" instead of a "paragraph," and
that's obviously a good thing.