Last product I worked on I made this a thing. Every modern browser now renders a very competent date picker for input type="date".

I find a lot of the arguments for building inaccessible UIs seem to conflate historical web issues with modern times. Virtually everything that sucked in the core web toolkit circa 2010 has essentially been solved in 2025, even on ultra-restrictive platforms like iOS Safari.

I have recently used plain old html date input in a internal tool and it works great.

Not the prettiest but I have seen much worse custom ones that were super buggy.

Native date inputs have their problems, but I default to them usually because they typically have the best behavior on mobile and are localized by default.

textbox is the warriors way of date input. Anything else is cruft. /s