"Competitive" is doing a lot of work there — it debuts at #41 on the AA index and the post itself calls it not the strongest overall. Mistral and Cohere's North are also non-Chinese open weights, so Llama 3 wasn't the last.
Right, and the article kind of proves your point even a plain button needs formAssociated + ElementInternals to feel native. A combobox with server-side filtering is a whole other galaxy.