I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

Just use Playwright Skill (https://github.com/lackeyjb/playwright-skill). It is a game changer. Otherwise it is Claude the Blind, as OP mentioned.

But that's cheating because it then has the source code containing the table and its styles.

I can confirm that this is what it does.

And if you ask it to not use tables, it cleverly uses div with the same layout as the table instead.

I think the idea is to let Claude see iterations of the reproduction with playwright, but still only allow access to screenshots of the original.