What LaTeX is
A LaTeX table is a tabular environment: a column specification, ampersands between cells and double backslashes at the end of each row.
Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf.
What TSV is
TSV is CSV with tabs instead of commas. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, quoting is rarely needed and the files are easier to read by eye.
Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to TSV
The tabular body is read, rules are dropped, and escaped characters are unescaped. Text wrapped in textbf or emph is reduced to the text itself.
Pick TSV over CSV when your values contain commas. Pasting the result straight into a spreadsheet fills the cells correctly with no import dialog.
What carries over from LaTeX to TSV
LaTeX records 3 things about a table that TSV has no way to hold.
LaTeX can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. TSV has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
TSV has no separate idea of a header, so the column names become an ordinary first row and nothing in the file marks them as different from the data.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in TSV and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The result can be read a record at a time, and appended to by adding to the end of it. That is worth having for a table too large to hold in memory, and it means a TSV file that is cut off part way through still gives you every record before the cut.
This is the direction that recovers structure: LaTeX has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.
The identifier 007 comes out of the TSV as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a TSV file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are doubled, which is how the delimited formats escape a quote in the TSV.