meter/progress can be styled consistently, but it's tricky because of the browser inconsistencies you mention. it took a lot of playing around with weird vendor-prefixed pseudos to get these looking similar across platforms.
sub/sub/abbr just need to be normalized first - normalize.css is a good reference for this. abbr can be useful for providing short "aside" info on a word/phrase in a semantic way.
styling detail/summary is relatively easy and they're pretty useful for FAQs and the like. i see web designers experimenting with more and more these days.
map/area, i don't use, but have seen it used on experimental designs to neat effect. and object is as you said, hard to predict for styling.
ps - it looks like chrome (105) will finally support mathML along with firefox and safari, so perhaps that will impact sub/sup usage in the future.