It appears that browser vendors have decided to break sites in order to ensure that people update their browsers properly. I have come to this conclusion from my experience and it has been corroborated in this stackoverflow answer

I had the same issue, it would work in safari but not chrome. Turns out I just needed to update my chrome browser. Apparently if your chrome version is out of date by two weeks functionality that has been around for over a decade breaks...you know google engineering at its finest...

Also it looks like an attempt by all browser vendors to ensure that people update their browsers because I've seen this issue happen in Firefox too. Approach seems to be this: Break all sites so user restarts browser, apply downloaded browser update during restart. -me in a comment on the linked answer

and by my current organisation's clients who kept reporting input buttons that appeared to randomly stop working and would get fixed on restarting the browser.

Steps to reproduce: On your Chrome or Firefox browser on Mac OS (might be reproducible on other OS and browsers too but I have so far only been able to verify MacOS Monterey and Big Sur), wait for an update to be downloaded but not applied. Open a page with a file input. Click on the file input. Expectation: File chooser opens. Observation: File chooser does not open. There is no perceived feedback from the browser.

Question: Is there a way to detect when file input is failing?