When setting focus() on a <table>, moving the VO (VoiceOver) cursor to the next element moves right past the entire <table>. I would expect it to move into the <table> and start reading the content of the first available cell.
When setting focus() on an element before the <table>, the VO cursor then moves into the <table> as expected.
See the Pen Table Focus by Scott Vinkle (@svinkle) on CodePen.
Testing this same code with NVDA works as expected.
This seems to be an issue with VO so I've gone ahead and filed a bug with Apple. Hopefully this gets fixed at some point!