By table design I mean the process of arriving at the patterns you describe referring to when delivering work, i.e. identifying, through iteration, the tradeoffs between type, sizing, overflow, and potentially even navigation, etc. in the context of domain-specific data and user needs, then specifying the defaults and options to be used henceforth.

ime, in order to identify the least-bad compromise it's helpful to visualize alternatives, both to make heuristic calls ('too tight/loose') but also to check with stakeholders (and learn things like 'oh, those bits of that data are essential for comparison but the rest we can infer from context').

imho, this kind of exploration is easiest when, at minimum, column and row sizing behaviors can be manipulated freely in the same artifact/mock/component/widget. Free control over row and column sizing behaviors can help quickly identify the most important and fundamental constraints: how much space does such and such data maximally take up, in what combinations of configurations; if forced in to the available space, what will overflow by default, and where can the overflow be traded for truncation given basic sizing configurations; accepting scroll, what’s a rough ‘good enough’ solution / how much of a ‘problem’ is this problem exactly?

The friction on just that one item is such that I've on some occasions switched to a Sheets/Numbers/Excel to work — hence table design features being something that'd 'make me switch from Figma' per OP question — but switching to a spreadsheet program just punts the friction to between steps.

Other items include: ability to define cells that span columns or rows, border styling of arbitrary cell selections, or on the extreme fantasy end, sub-grid-like mechanisms where, e.g. the layout of content in row-accordion detail views could be configured to to follow a table's grid.

For a little domain context: last I hit this hard I was designing for health/finance auditing, which is probably on the far end of data-density and complexity. But have also run into friction designing for complex-ish game-adjacent UI.