I'm familiar with them, sure. But to assume something like this is broken rather than simply a color choice would, to me, be a strange and usually wrong assumpt

I'm familiar with them, sure. But to assume something like this is broken rather than simply a color choice would, to me, be a strange and usually wrong assumption. Given that we've all (well, most of us) been on the web for 20-some years now, and noticed that web designers, for better or worse, often stray from defaults and choose different colors. More often than they put a form field with all the fields disabled. I'd certainly try typing into it before I emailed customer support. Incidently, on that codepen, the background colors of the disabled and non-disabled elements are identical, to my eyes. The only difference is in the border color. (and the behavior when clicked on)