This is sooo true. By staying on the back-end for a few years, I managed to avoid front-end JavaScript long enough to watch Angular come and go.
Unfortunately, React has had quite a bit more staying power and I ended up having to pick up some proficiency with it. That said, the ecosystem evolves enough that no two projects ever seem to use the same tooling.
> It's a cognizant choice that learning isn't worth the effort.
They're very often not wrong. If you're trying to optimize for learning new concepts instead of new implementations (particularly when said implementations are ephemeral), then the right choice is usually to ignore the latest stuff unless it becomes an absolute necessity to adopt it.
And most 'cutting edge' frameworks can be picked up in around a week or two once you have experience anyway. I remember it taking me about 4 working days to get the hang of RoR (with ~2 yrs of professional experience).
Most developers would be better served spending their time learning soft skills around productivity, networking/politicking, communication, writing, and otherwise living well-balanced lives with the rest of their time. Hell even doing Leetcode is probably a better use of time than picking up the latest framework.
That's all you got? Developer should just be sophisticated and experienced in every new thing immediately?
We can all get by and pick up anything well enough to do a functional job, and we can all apply some bits of general experience in any language or other domain.
But you confuse that with an actually good job?
I submit that you just outed youself as never having done an actually good job.
What you call "AngularJS" used to be referred to as just "Angular". Then Angular v2 and later were so different that Angular v1.x became known as AngularJS.
But that's mostly just branding. They're essentially different frameworks.
Unfortunately, React has had quite a bit more staying power and I ended up having to pick up some proficiency with it. That said, the ecosystem evolves enough that no two projects ever seem to use the same tooling.