Gentle creatures of the forest,
I'm a 40-something software engineer who, for the past ten years, has primarily been doing distributed systems backend work. Before that I was full-stack. I'm wondering what your recommendations are for getting back up to speed on the frontend world.
I've dabbled in React, D3, and some of the modern browser APIs (fetch, promises, better DOM selectors). I'm vaguely aware of a thing called Babel. And apparently Node is used for more than just running a server.
My confusion about where to focus my relearning efforts comes from an impression, rightly or wrongly, that frontend dev went kind of nuts and turned itself into a big mess. This is just my impression from the outside, not an informed professional judgment. It has seemed like we've been churning through frameworks, tools, and paradigms on a semiannual basis. Is this still happening, or have things started to stabilize?
What I'm looking for is a standard core that I can focus on, and some best practices, without getting into the weeds on anything superfluous.
Once you've built a few small projects, hopefully you'll have a sense of the pain points modern frameworks fix. Most people use global variables for state or even store their state in their html and then use JS to update the html. Modern frameworks do it differently, asking you to manage state and then creating a view as a function of that state.
If you do go the react route don't confuse yourself by using redux. People associate them so heavily they even refer to it as "learning react/redux". I've never seen a great use case for redux in the wild and believe it to be an antipattern. I've never written a redux reducer, but I've removed hundreds of lines of redux code, always to the betterment and simplification of the app.
You can form your own opinions later, but I really recommend learning to build react apps without global state, learning the basics like props, hooks, event bubbling, etc. Then if you ever need safe, immutable global state you can learn redux.