"Pick off the low-hanging fruit" works for a shop looking to turn some mad profit without having to do a lot of deep thinking. And that's certainly fine. But if that's the culture of the industry, we'd be sacrificing progress and innovation for a quick and ephemeral dollar.
There's a quiet theme that runs through the community here, and tech in general, that suggests everything that's new is often just old-again. A lot of these "rapid changes" really do feel like reinvention and change for its own sake, and seems plagued with the same issue as above -- building new iterations on existing ideas, picking off low-hanging fruit but not really going anywhere.
edit:
The problem is that these technologies, being so beginner-friendly and aggressively marketed, rapidly pick up steam and become the “cool” things to use, regardless of actual merit or lack thereof.
This line hit it on the head for me. I've been in the business for a while but have only been programming directly for a fraction of that -- I can readily admit, a lot of the newer JS libraries and frameworks made me feel like a superhero with almost no proper training or understanding of computer science.
until the low hanging fruit all got picked.
Your argument makes it sound like you're saying no hard problems are being worked on currently, which is simply not true.
technologies change quickly because everybody wants to ship fast and put out something just good enough to be better than the last half baked solution that was shipped because technologies change quickly.
how do you get out of that vicious cycle?