This a great comment. Yes you can still use jQuery and yes it's still very powerful, but it lets you shoot your own foot off too much -- and your whole team's feet are in danger too.
Angular was a huge step up in "you won't shoot your foot off-ness" and React is a step further. You still can, but you realize that you're loading the gun most of the time and can take a step back.
And that is really all this churn is about -- trying to make things easier and more foolproof. We've introduced other problems trying to solve the first couple batches of problems (accidentally using the development version of Reach on production is one I see a lot), but we'll get there.
The PHP ecosystem has had quite a bit of churn in the last 5 years too, but the yelling about it doesn't seem to be as loud since people aren't forced into it since there are alternate languages.
But getting started is simpler with PHP, also. The framework you'll use (Laravel, Symfony) and is associated coding paradigms will probably be a different one than 4 years back (Codeigniter, CakePHP, w/e), but apart from that composer is pretty much the only new tool you'll use apart from that. No webpack/browserify/transpiling/gulp/bower/whatever.
Angular was a huge step up in "you won't shoot your foot off-ness" and React is a step further. You still can, but you realize that you're loading the gun most of the time and can take a step back.
And that is really all this churn is about -- trying to make things easier and more foolproof. We've introduced other problems trying to solve the first couple batches of problems (accidentally using the development version of Reach on production is one I see a lot), but we'll get there.
The PHP ecosystem has had quite a bit of churn in the last 5 years too, but the yelling about it doesn't seem to be as loud since people aren't forced into it since there are alternate languages.