A11y is mostly handled by just using semantic html.
The designer, in my experience, is totally fine with just using a normal select element, they don't demand that I reinvent the drop-down with divs just to put rounded corners on the options.
Nobody cares about that stuff. These are minor details, we can change it later if someone really wants it. As long as we're not just sitting on our hands for lack of work I'm not putting effort into reinventing things the browser has already solved.
I hope in the future I can work with that kind of designer. Maybe it is just my limited experience, but in that limited experience, web designers care way too much about details and design features/ideas/concepts, that are not part of HTML or CSS and then frontend developers would have to push back and tell the web designer, that form follows function and that the medium they design for is important. Basic design principles actually, that the designers should know themselves, just like they should know the medium they are targeting (semandic HTML, CSS, capabilities of them both, a tiny bit about JS too), to keep things reasonable. But most frontend devs are happy to build fancy things with JS instead of pushing back when it matters. And not so many frontend devs want to get into CSS deeply and do everything they can to avoid JS. So needless things do get implemented all the time.
The designer, in my experience, is totally fine with just using a normal select element, they don't demand that I reinvent the drop-down with divs just to put rounded corners on the options.
Nobody cares about that stuff. These are minor details, we can change it later if someone really wants it. As long as we're not just sitting on our hands for lack of work I'm not putting effort into reinventing things the browser has already solved.