There are certainly cases where visual design is much more critical to what you're building, but there are plenty where it's little more than an annoying distraction.
A select is a select using a native widget
An input is a standard OS input widget
And so on
It also looks and feels better.
That boils down to which technologies you are familiar with.
> It also looks and feels better.
And this is highly subjective too. Of course looks are very independent from system to system but the feels depend on the tech stack quite a bit.
Where do you think 'select' came from? Long ago we had many UI select boxes in many native frameworks...and decided that was too much work so we made tags...then browsers...most of the disconnect comes because UI controls have so many usages that ultimately you always want to bust out some code.
If OpenUI wants to enhance the default behavior of select, input, credit card, etc, cool, if they just want to build anothet framework then I'd rather use svelte or angular or vue. The large libraries already standardize, its just a matter of who 'wins' out, and there are already only a few SPA winners.
> To many developers, what the software does is several orders of magnitude more important than how it looks.
Native widgets are still the easier way to produce an UI that looks good enough to work with
This link[1] explains how they work on different OS, if they work for desktop apps, why shouldn't they work for web based ones?
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Forms/Basic_n...
But then offering a shinier/slightly more bespoke way of doing that becomes a competitive advantage for your product, and now you get why everyone wants to build their own custom UI.
The reason why the aforelinked to Open UI project will never be the One and Only way to build UIs on the web is because there’d too much economic value in being able to do precisely what it can’t do!