The JS ecosystem is wild and moving way too fast, but even that is not really the trouble with it: it's that it's being overused.
He mentions DHTML at the beginning, which was the perfect example of using too much of something: mouse trailing bouncy balls with falling snow, my, I don't really miss those days.
Yet we're here in 2017 and React & Co. is crippling the web. Plain simple news or a blog site rendering with JS? AMP, loading megabytes of Javascript, claiming to speed up the web? When your product is text, how about you serve text and maybe only boost it or do analytics with JS? I know it's not fancy, but for a lot of sites out there, JS based rendering is completely unneeded.
In case of web apps... A little while ago I listened to a talk of front end colleagues, claiming that we'll speed up the site by async calling some blocks, so the initial content will get down fast and the less important ones will follow. When I asked if we're measuring the very end render time - the one that heats the CPUs, because you offload the rendering to the client, which can get quite stressful - the answer was 'no', mostly because nobody knows how to do it. I also asked about how screenreaders will work with this, and they thought I'm talking about mobile, which is extremely sad, and no, I'm unaware of any screenreader-friendly JS based app. (Screenreaders are the programs literally reading out the text for visually impaired.)
Google and FB offers fallback, HTML-only solutions to their services, because the realised their things don't work on slow connections and/or slow devices. Maybe this should be taken as a sign.