After conversing with Grandfather it turns out that the source of the confusion is version 1.10 of HTML::TableExtract. After clearing up my own confusion, since I was comparing 2.x version of the docs, I finally went back and looked at the 1.10 documentation. It is indeed confusing.

Since then, of course, I've moved on to the 2.x series and the deprecations have actually taken place.

Cheers,
Matt