is tableview collapse really bursting in like this?

You need to change the style of the tableView to grouped, when you initialize it:

let tableView = UITableView(frame: someFrame, style: .grouped)

or from Storyboard:

After that you will have this issue, which I solved by setting a tableHeaderView to the tableView that has CGFloat.leastNormalMagnitude as its height:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    
    var frame = CGRect.zero
    frame.size.height = .leastNormalMagnitude
    tableView.tableHeaderView = UIView(frame: frame)
}