I learnt a lot from the article Modern JavaScript Explained For Dinosaurs[0] (featured on HN recently), which explains the history of developments from vanilla JS to 2017, "a historical context of how JavaScript tools have evolved to what they are today". I thought it was brilliant at making sense of the jungle you describe.

I'm pretty sure it will remove the dread.

[0] https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-...