Honestly it's a bit disheartening to see a community with so much insight readily jump to bashing every single "hip new thing" in the browser/JS world, heck, even npm/bower.
I think part of it is because of the proliferation of JS in recent years, whereas many people still have this notion of copy/paste Javascript "skiddies". Even among new grads with significantly less experience, I often hear some voicing concerns that "web developers are not real programmers", or there's "nothing hard about front-end work", "CSS is only for designers", or "only people who can't do CS become web developers".
On the other hand, yes, new frameworks are appearing every day, and it's obvious this is a huge source of frustration; but we do we need to chase every new framework? Is it actually true that an application written in X framework HAS to be re-written every 2 years instead of a pure jQuery-based application? What is preventing you from continuing to use Angular v1, that you have no choice but to port everything to v2? (also worth noting that you can port only parts of your app to v2 and run them in tandem but I digress)
I don't want to start another flame war here (which seems to be a common trend these few days), but how many people do you know that has a deep understanding of the costs of DOM reflows and how to mitigate/minimize them? As a full stack developer who has done quite a bit of front-end work the past few years, I can tell you: not many.
Okay, so maybe you say: "For X and Y application that knowledge isn't important." That very well may be the case, but how about those that build richer and more complex interfaces that (maybe) involves thousands or even hundreds of thousands of elements on the page? What then? Has no one ever seen the absolutely abysmal jank and (lack of) performance some JS apps have?
Is it really so horrible that we have to bash and nitpick on every single thing someone makes in the web community? Is it wrong for your kid to come home one day, exclaim "look what I drew today!", and show you a horrific picture of you looking like a gorilla? Or maybe it's okay that a lot of people are very working hard to do away with the hairy pain points we have currently, make it harder for you to shoot yourself in the foot, and maybe introduce some (small) pain points of their own inadvertently? Maybe it's possible that we're not all perfect humans with perfect ideas?
I'll give a quick example of what it's been like for my experience/or the experience of people I've worked with with jQuery/Angular/React.
jQuery:
I want to update this element, okay I'll add a class or id as an identifier and query the DOM. Then I'll change the text in here. Oh but now I want to add another element to this list here (but I haven't cached the selector because I haven't learned that yet), let me query that element, create a new element, then append it.
Angular:
I want to update the text on this element, okay, I'll change it in $scope, or the template directly. I also need to add a list item, okay, let's just .push() the new record in our $scope variable and it'll appear since we already told Angular to iterate on this model.
As for DOM updates? Well, I may or may not know it, but Angular is going to update it for me on the next $digest cycle which happens in intervals or can be triggered manually, after doing a dirty check for $scope/$watch.
React:
Similar to my thought process with Angular, I update the list item in our model with setState, and React will do its virtual DOM diffs and update for me, or maybe it doesn't update because shouldComponentUpdate told it not to. And it only touches the elements necessary on the actual DOM.
Perhaps it doesn't seem like a big difference, but after working with all 3, speaking from personal experience: once you have to return to doing pure jQuery, you realize how forced and unnatural everything now feels.
Give it five minutes: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes