I don't believe you can shrink a table row to hide the controls in it, but you can place conditional formatting on individual controls to hide them under certain conditions, and if you set the heights of the cells in the table to auto, the row will collapse whenever all the controls in it are hidden.
Also don't forget that a Section control can be bound to virtually anything. It does not have to be bound to a node in the main data source, and can even be bound to the same node(s) as the control(s) inside it, so you can use a Section control to perform conditional formatting without duplicating any field values.