The answer shouldn't be "create something custom for entering dates that don't happen to be in the current year", it should be "fix the datepicker so it's fit for purpose".
Just picking the year is so difficult already on both Android and iOS as well as desktop Chrome, so a custom widget is immediately 100x better.
Yes, in theory it would be best to display the native picker because in theory it has a great UX, but in practice the native browsers' implementations are mostly just really, really bad, for whatever reason.
That's what I really dislike about the linked article - it doesn't even check the native implementations for their quality but just argues as if they are great.
