Combo Boxes and Date Pickers: CSS Form Control Styling Level 1 [1] will be a massive game changer. `appearance: base` will make it easier to style every part of a browser's form input with just CSS as they start with fewer opinions on how it should be styled (less trying to be platform-specific, more web platform generic) and have more CSS selectors for their component parts. Yet they will still have all the accessibility of native form controls. Really hoping that draft moves forward this year.
Stylable form controls are definitely a step in the right direction. It really should not be taking this long though. In the meantime, developers have been building broken, half-assed, inaccessible inputs just to satisfy aesthetic requirements.