It's ok, the people who have picked a weekend to learn it feel sorry for those stuck in 2005 web design, too!
Sometimes I think web devs specifically and devs in general forget just how much you have to know to get started even with something "easy" like Django. You gotta know HTML (it gets new features, too), CSS, SQL, Python, Javascript, and the tools necessary to each of them. You gotta learn all that while a framework abstracts it from you. And that's not even considering the choice before that. Why not Rails or something else? Frontend dev is pretty simple in comparison, you're just familiar with one and not the other.
Node is an interpreter that runs JS on the backend. If you understand what Python or Ruby do, then you understand it. You of course can use it on the backend, but the main reason frontend devs use it is to compile the most recent versions of JS down to stuff that works on browsers. You're free not to do that, but JS has evolved for the better over the last decade. Babel is the main tool people use to do this, and webpack uses something like Babel to "pack" your app/components for the frontend. In a lot of cases, if you are using webpack, you don't need grunt. But both of them are build systems, which all language ecosystems use.
Most of it is optional but quasi-necessary and fits a defined role and need. But don't miss the forest for the trees, don't let choice anxiety get to you. What you want to learn is the underlying model, which is a huge step up from what people were dong 10 years ago. If you don't want to get complicated, there are a few "no choice" options.
1) Use React or another view library without any fancy schmancy tools.
2) Use a small, full-stack framework like hyperapp or Elm. This is the entirety of the model you want to understand, and both are small and easy to learn (we're talking a day if not an hour).
3) Use a bigger, everything included framework like Vue. There's no guarantee it won't be passe like Ember or Angular in five years, but there's an existing community and documented way of doings things.
Pick one of them, any of them, but don't get in that dread of choice. The great thing is once you've learned any of them, the concepts are wide enough that you can pick up another framework really fast. As in I can look at any of these and understand what they are doing the same way you can look at a web MVC framework from 2005 and know the hows and whys of what they are doing in an hour.
The great thing about the churn is it's like Christmas every day. You don't have to pick up any of the new stuff coming out, but I'd rather have options and evolution rather than not. The alternative is stagnation.
It's really fun and empowering. I encourage you and others not to get discouraged. Oh, and don't feel sorry for your coworkers. They're learning new stuff. What's better?