The person who wrote this post is incredibly creative. Every one of these is more interesting than 10 google tools. I guess thus is the rule of industrial tools, that is, to minimize surprise.

Patrick is incredibly creative with CSS. Check out his lab on his website which is full of more wild stuff: https://patrickbrosset.com/lab/

I admit this is neat tech but I am not looking forward to the monstrosities that are going to result. I'm hoping there will be (already is?) something that could translate anything into a stripped down minimal-effect version. Like reader mode but universal

That already exists because it's just a styled dropdown menu. If you remove the CSS, it reverts back to an unstyled dropdown menu like what is seen at the beginning of the article: https://i0.wp.com/css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/...

Yeah, and maybe I'm overcomplicating this in my head, but it's based on my difficult experience trying to reduce distracting/annoying styling ad-hoc. My ideal is something that's able to "universally" produce a barebones version of a page that matches its original layout as best it can, and otherwise leaves it semi functional/readable. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time sitting and thinking about how to do this generically and it's easier than I think.

Would changing your usercontent.css or uBlock Origin filter to set all select appearance attributes to auto help? There are some challenges, like the custom style could hide elements, but I think that should give fall-back equivilent styling.

This is still better than currebt monstrosities because the underlying select should still be an actual select (including keyboard navigation etc.)