It makes sense from a historical perspective. Tables are a thing in many languages, just not the ones that mainstream devs use. In fact, if you rank programming languages by usage outside of devs, the top languages all have a table-ish metaphor (SQL, Excel, R, Matlab).

The languages devs use are largely Algol derived. Algol is a language that was used to express algorithms, which were largely abstractions over Turing machines, which are based around an infinite 1D tape of memory. This model of 1D memory was built into early computers, and early operating systems and early languages. We call it "mechanical sympathy".

Meanwhile, other languages at the same time were invented that weren't tied so closely to the machine, but were more for the purpose of doing science and math. They didn't care as much about this 1D view of the world. Early languages like Fortran and Matlab had notions of 2D data matrices because math and science had notions of 2D data matrices. Languages like C were happy to support these things by using an array of pointers because that mapped nicely to their data model.

The same thing can be said for 1-based and 0-based indexing -- languages like Matlab, R, and Excel are 1-based because that's how people index tables; whereas languages like C and Java are 0-based because that's how people index memory.