There's nothing about Safari that makes it "the new IE8". Ironically, the very same HN that bemoans every new thing as "why should devs jump onto this shiny new things, just slow down already" criticises Safari for not jumping onto every new thing.
HN is quite diverse and I'm pretty sure those are two disjoint sets of users. (I'm in the former group myself --- not a fan of presenting information in such a way as to decrease its accessibility while also increasing resource usage.)
I bet I could make those accordion sections work in all browsers going back to IE5 without much effort, and use nothing near 120KB of JS to do it... but no, most "modern web devs" would rather pile on the bloat of their libraries and "best practices" to make something that works only in the very latest version of the one browser they personally use.
<summary>/<details> tags with JS polyfill is all you'd need.
Why you think something would be broken when a polyfill is used as fallback, I don't know.
Google was really carrying a big part of the webkit development.
Define "accepted". Hastily implemented and shoved down everyone's throat by Chrome doesn't mean "accepted".
> Google was really carrying a big part of the webkit development.
Nope. Google is dominating the development space with utter disregard for public/dev opinion.
Every web dev I know bitches about it.