Talking about tables, if you're not using tabularray in 2024, you're doing yourself a disservice IMHO. I almost use it exclusively except for text formatting as only tabularx supports page footnotes easily.

It has turned LaTeX tables from absolutely annoying to something that actually makes sense and looks nice and comes with most tools you want from tables. Except booktabs which it supports with an option. For example, it supports cells with line breaks, variable width columns, multiline and multi row cells - and even manages to align the text in them correctly. I don't know how Jianrui Lyu did this, but he did.

So yeah. Tables in LaTeX don't have to be pain.