It is indeed correct that you only need VLOOKUP ( although the INDEX/MATCH combination is much better IMO) using a dynamic range or a table as data source, so what's wrong with that?
You VLOOKUP would look something like =VLOOKUP("ab";Table1[#All];2;0) with a table

And I also think that using entire columns is not the best way to go as it forbids you to use those columns for other things than extending your data source

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