I recently started making a personal reddit clone mostly to learn Grid properly but I'm having no problem making custom controls (checkboxes, search bars, forms, etc) that look "professional" with just a consistent color palette, some borders, shadows, gradients, and linear transitions.
A lot of it in my experience is because you can use flex / grid almost everywhere to evenly space / proportion content now so you don't have to do as much pixel fidgeting to get things looking right. I'm using .5rem gaps and padding everywhere and it just looks pretty dang crisp out of the box.
At least compared to what you could do even five years ago its lightyears ahead in ergonomics. Still rubbish because its still html and css at the end of the day, but a far cry from floating half the page.
A lot of it in my experience is because you can use flex / grid almost everywhere to evenly space / proportion content now so you don't have to do as much pixel fidgeting to get things looking right. I'm using .5rem gaps and padding everywhere and it just looks pretty dang crisp out of the box.
At least compared to what you could do even five years ago its lightyears ahead in ergonomics. Still rubbish because its still html and css at the end of the day, but a far cry from floating half the page.