Railing against it is railing against the best-in-class example of what you want... even if it still falls short of what you want. A decade is nothing to sneeze at.
We've had React 1 (components) and now React 2 (hooks), they just managed the transition better than angular and so gobbled that market share.
jQuery stayed mostly stable, there was only one version that I can remember where it was a bit of a hassle to upgrade it. But it's quite a while ago now, so could be mis-remembering.
There was many versions of jQuery. I remember the days of hacking Drupal to load multiple versions because it shipped with an older version, but we needed a newer one for other dependencies.
I think it still would have happened, but it's a shortsighted read into competitive analysis to not understand how this happened.