Alternative to bootstrap for navbars/buttons/inputs?

I can make a decent looking website with bootstrap, but currently I am working on the new front end cert (I have the old one), and im trying to use only flexbox/css grid, so that I can master it better for use in my React projects. But useing just css, my navbar/buttons/forms end up looking like a website from the late 1990s, how do most people go about doing this? I know I could look up images for my buttons, but that would be very time consuming, also I guess I could just look at how bootstrap does it? Is that the only way? Just seems overly complicated.

Bootstrap makes things much easier because it works a lot like a foundation. It gets you started in the right direction, but everything it does can be done on your own.

For example a bootstrap button vs a hand-made css button I threw together in 2 mins:

You can see mine has a lot more code, since I didn’t have the library do all the work for me. Rest assured, bootstrap makes things easier but isn’t doing anything outside of CSS that you could do.

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You are basically saying you’re surprised it takes more time and effort to cook your own food than buying it pre-made, obviously it does, but you also get to decide how it is going to taste and look.

Anyway, you don’t have to use all of bootstrap, you can just use parts of it. That goes for any UI framework. Or just google button css and you will get a bunch of things to pick from.