The "holy grail" nickname comes from how hard this used to be with tables and floats — matching the side columns' height to the main content was notoriously fiddly. Flexbox and CSS Grid turned it into a few lines of code.
With Grid the clearest way is a grid-template-areas of "header header header" / "nav main aside" / "footer footer footer". Because areas don't have to follow source order, you can also push nav below main on mobile without reordering the markup.
Today it's cited more as a teaching example of how cleanly Grid solves an old problem than as a layout people build as-is — real products more often drop the sidebar or keep nav only in the header.
When to use
Good for document-style sites (wikis, admin panels) with clearly separate nav, content and secondary info. Content-first products often work better with a simpler, sidebar-free structure.