These tables have a wide variety of sizes: sometimes thousands of rows, sometimes 4; sometimes 4 columns; sometimes 400; sometimes mostly numerical, sometimes mostly categorical.
So I need flexibility, with a minimal number of user controls (to keep it simple and intelligent).
What prior art should I look at for ideas?
I still use the ancient datatables from jquery. I have found some few alternatives, but they often were worse.
Not sure how you can look for them or what you would call such components. HTML table decorators? As for the design, I never do anything fancy for tables. Maximal readability and no fluff, probably alternating colors for rows if you indeed have many columns. Other than that...