What would a default birthdate be? That would span 80+ years. That's not going to work. Any time an input spans ~29k values, you better provide some logarithmic-time searching mechanism. So yes, Safari's date picker is f'ing dumb.
From left to right, that's Chrome desktop, Chrome mobile, Safari desktop, Safari mobile, and Firefox desktop
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The post specified that the users are mostly senior. Regardless of what they go with clearly 0% of their users benefit from leaving it to default today unless they somehow figured out how to sell smartphones to fetuses