> Give me some sort of promise when you'll leave the standard alone, then I'll wait for the community to form best practices / libraries to catch up

I don't understand what's stopping you from doing that. There are many perfectly fine jQuery/Backbone/Angular/etc apps that are chugging along perfectly fine. There's no reason for you to adopt new technology unless it makes your life easier.

And therein lies the problem -- for a long time developing an SPA in JS was absolutely terrible. And it's getting better, and getting better due to efforts of people who love the language. Webpack didn't beat Gulp because Corporate Sponsor X adopted it, Webpack beat Gulp because some guy wrote it and it turned out to be awesome. To me that's worth more than upsetting the curmudgeons who complain about perceived fatigue.