If you remember earlier versions of HTML, with all the tables and font tag soup, it was not always the case. Sadly, it was easier building layouts with tables instead of CSS for a very, very long time.
How the elements were abused does not take away from the fact that HTML elements represent their content, not their layout except for <table> which is probably the only the exception.
These elements weren't "abused." It was the only alternative before CSS was around! Then CSS took years (decades?) to catch up to the simplicity of table-based layouts.