Weird, I paid attention not to merge any in a freshly-generated file.

Indeed, my wording could have been better — I meant that by default cell width is inherited after column width.

And they did — you literally saved me dozens of hours of work. Thanks a bunch!

The only downside is that while it takes seconds to parse 2 pages worth of tables, it takes forever to parse 20 pages with numerous prompts in-between. But I guess that's hardware and Word itself.