OK, went down a rabbit hole but found an answer...
The reason we cannot reduce the row height below default on a Perspective table by adding a maxHeight (or max-height) property is because the default styling already includes a min-height property of 30px. So, to reduce the default row height we can just set min-height to something lower than the 30px default (even 0px). This way you can avoid setting a fixed row height like my previous post suggested.
You can set a reduced default height for each row. To do that under props.rows.style set the minHeight (or min-height) property to 28px (or alternate height of your choosing less than the default 30px). If you set it to 0px the the row height is defined by the contents.
The default min-height for the table row was found (and modification tested) using developer tools in Chrome:
Another nifty trick/cheat (perhaps related) for when you are trying to force a Perspective component, container or embedded container to fit into another size (bigger or smaller) is to use the CSS zoom property to scale everything.
I have used this with process diagrams created in a coordinate container targeting desktop that I then need to adapt to another display size, and with the toggle component because I don't like the default formatting (seems out of place with other component defaults) and I'll usually scale (zoom) it to 80%.
To scale the table, add a zoom property to props.style and set it to 75% (or another percentage of your choice).
There are ways to scale according to available screen size using zoom with page dimension properties, I could write that up if someone is interested.
Caution: Browser support for zoom is not universal, use at your own risk.