That was my initial point actually: a lot of these tradeoffs happen accidentally since for instance you have to write a custom component to do something basic a

That was my initial point actually: a lot of these tradeoffs happen accidentally since for instance you have to write a custom component to do something basic as changing the background color of a select options. If more powerful browser components would be available then designers would be happy to just style those, and functionality and accessibility would still be fine.