Then why do you move on to the next thing?
Not a frontend dev, but I notice that a lot of frontend devs seem to be really eager to jump to the next hot thing when it becomes available, even though the thing they are using is still well maintained.
The more official reason to move to the next thing is because browsers are a moving target. Browsers are constantly releasing new capabilities. And the overall population of users is always moving onto newer versions of those browsers; even if that migration lags a bit, it happens. When we can use those newer browser features, we can provide better services to users.
Vite is exciting because it's built on top of the native ES6 features that are now ubiquitously supported by most browsers. It's such a smooth ride compared to older tools. The dev experience is great, and the end-user bundles are light. I've been very impressed with it.
I sympathize with your sentiment when it comes to the back-end. I want stable tools there. But until the front-end platform (browsers) is similarly stable, some churn will be welcome to support emerging possibilities.
react has changed a lot. i mean hooks pretty much is a rewrite or rethink of core concepts. nothing wrong with that per se, just that things just move to fast, there is no respect for long term stability and web seems to have a greater share of shiny new thing contrarian hipsters.
And for another, you can use React without writing a single useEffect(). Class components are still very much a thing!
I think you mean "even IF the thing is still maintained". This is a big IF. Something as ubiquitous as a React app may still work fine after a few years, but try updating or fixing something and you're in for a world of hurt.
But it is very stressful to update from Webpack 2 to 5 for example. So taking an old project from a couple of years ago and updating the dependencies is not that easy, especially if you were using a lot of the build tools features.
If you are fairly careful and conservative, and lucky enough to be using software after it has matured, I think most upgrades will wind up being pretty uneventful for you.
I'm saying it explicitly: your exception project probably sucked. That's probably why it was tricky to upgrade. It may not have been your fault or even the fault of the people who wrote it. But for example, it was never architecturally a good idea to have Webpack automatically import browserify Node stubs. It was never a good idea to load Node modules from within an Electron renderer thread. Not always your fault. A reasonably well-archirected app usually refactors decently into changes that fix these issues. A poorly architecture app is so fragile it's hard to imagine refactoring anything without something breaking a few miles away. If you have the latter, then no shit that upgrading dependencies sucks... I mean, changing anything else sucks too.
This isn't the root cause of every horror story... But it's a lot of them
Upgrading dependencies can be a trap. Like, in the past, I've delegated a bugfix that shouldn't take more then an hour or two to a co-worker, only to see them waste an entire day in dependency / NPM hell.
To my mind, there needs to be a compelling case or argument that justifies sinking time in an upgrading exercise.
Heaven help you if you need to go back to a site you built for a client 4 years ago and try to make changes now. 90% chance that your build toolchain will be completely broken and fail to work.
For me React have been doing all and beyond for me on a dev and business pov and will continues for a log time hopefully a decade. But it's frontend so it's already weird that it stayed that long.
But I don't think that it is necessary to literally switch technology every 1-2 years to keep up, if we can use React (or Vue) which has been stable for a while and is still wildly popular.
If someone created a framework yesterday there are few experts, and they won't judge experts by years of experience, if you're a relatively new FE in the job market would you go compete with people with 15+ years of jQuery and 8+ years of React or just take on the next new thing?
If you pickup the latest tooling today by the time it's widespread(like React is now) you're way ahead of the crop and it's quite easy to get some nice pay out of that.