>Can you recommend any good resources to help me orient my mind to this new way of thinking?
The thing about web frontend development is that it suffered from the browser wars and having to appeal to amateur developers. Amateur developers love "Worse is Better"[1]. Basically sacrifice all consistency in favor of simplicity and getting started quickly. "Worse is Better" makes things simple to the point of making ugly hacks for certain situations that don't fit that extreme focus on simplicity.
The browser wars made everything horribly inconsistent. Microsoft's strategy was to make the most broken non-standard code possible automatically work and everyone had to emulate that.
The most clean frontend development I've worked with was Angular with ScalaJS. Typescript in Angular 2 should be really clean. The underlying web browser stuff will never be cleaned up since it has to be backwards compatible.
Angular feels clean enough, but how do you implement internationalisation properly? How do you switch to angular 2 now that angular 1 is obsolete? Same thing with bootstrap (v2 is largely incompatible with v3 which is mostly incompatible with v4)... Backend is okay; frontend really is a clusterfuck, because it seems all built for short-lived, one shot applications. I build professional applications that have to live and evolve for ages, and I'd rather not rewrite the 80000 LOC of code for every brand new shiny incompatible material design fully reactive 3D enabled VR compatible à la mode fashionable trendy JS+CSS framework that'll be obsoleted in 9 months.
At the moment, I really don't know what to do. Looking at the way people build applications nowadays (does somebody NOT use node.js and npm at some point?) with layers upon layers of languages, frameworks, 4 different module management systems, with READMEs that read like "install the dependancies using "gem install A B C; pip install E F G; npm install X Y Z; go install U V W; cargo install P Q R; then proceed with curl https://github/myshit/install.sh | bash" is really tiring.
I was using node.js for a while and having to deal with the same bugs over and over again. Usually the bug would be passing the wrong type or mistyping a name. I started using Typescript and things got a lot better. Scala.js is great and all, and probably a good choice if you're using Scala on the backend, but Typescript works a bit better because the Javascript it generates is pretty close to the original. If you search the HN archives, people seem pretty happy with it.
The difference is that Scala is a vastly better, designed language. It's not something like Typescript which tries to salvage JavaScript without being able to fix the worst parts.
Scala also has much better, more mature tooling and IDE support.
The build system is also amazing, not the mess cobbled together in JavaScript that is changing every second week.
In addition to that you have stable, existing and mature libraries which work on multiple platforms, achieving _real_ cross platform support. (Not this "if you make JavaScript run outside of the browser..." nonsense.)
Plus, the quality of libraries is so much higher because they aren't written by JS kids with a maximum attention span of 5 minutes.
Ok, this is really weird, why did your link forward me to this NSFW page until i copied the URL manually into the address bar (Again, NOT safe for work): http://imgur.com/32R3qLv
Hovering showed the correct jwz url as well. Is that your or JWZ's doing? JWZ's page has even retained the imgur favicon (chrome, mac).
The thing about web frontend development is that it suffered from the browser wars and having to appeal to amateur developers. Amateur developers love "Worse is Better"[1]. Basically sacrifice all consistency in favor of simplicity and getting started quickly. "Worse is Better" makes things simple to the point of making ugly hacks for certain situations that don't fit that extreme focus on simplicity.
The browser wars made everything horribly inconsistent. Microsoft's strategy was to make the most broken non-standard code possible automatically work and everyone had to emulate that.
The most clean frontend development I've worked with was Angular with ScalaJS. Typescript in Angular 2 should be really clean. The underlying web browser stuff will never be cleaned up since it has to be backwards compatible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Edit: Replaced the JWZ URL with wikipedia. Apparently JWZ has some anti-hacker news redirect code on his site.