(Separately from the above)
One of the biggest asks we’ve seen from community members (and one of my biggest frustrations) has been the ability to control the column width which is separate than column span. I don’t know that I’ve seen much discussion of this and I’m not sure whether there’s a viable solution to allow people to call out a max column width, for example (either in percentages or px).
Pandoc does have a system for this.
For grid, simple, and multiline tables, widths are calculated based on the widths in the source.
For pipe tables, if one of the lines extends beyond 72 columns (configurable), then relative widths are calculated based on the widths of the separator lines.