It has been a minute since that constraint applied, yeah.
But also, using Tables for page layout had less to do with box layout problems and more to do with the lack of something like CSS Grid (finally, decades later). Tables let you define regular grids in a way that was closer to designing a grid (thinking in terms of spans across cells instead of widths/margins). Tables for layout didn't truly go away until around the Bootstrap era with its column grid helpers (and their complex CSS math to make that work before both flexbox and native CSS Grid).
I love Firefox to this day, but mathematically the choices that box model made made sense as easier on the renderer but was awful to work with for the web developer.
It's great that we have the choice between box models today and their behavior is better standardized. I know if you surveyed CSS in the wild you'd find most CSS is written for the IE box model (border-box) and yet it is funny that that is the one you have to opt-in to because that adds to the overall impression that CSS by default is broken and needs reset stylesheets and boilerplate.
And for that purpose, it's still the best option.
HN dates from the period I described and still uses tables for general page layout, hence the original commenter's query to which I replied.
According to Wiki HN dates from 2007. I think Yahoo moved from table to CSS layout earlier. CSS Zen Garden is from around 2003.
