I'm coming from a similar position as you (trying to merge a hodgepodge of Swing, AWT, JSP, and Rails GUIs into a coherent, modular frontend) and running in to

I'm coming from a similar position as you (trying to merge a hodgepodge of Swing, AWT, JSP, and Rails GUIs into a coherent, modular frontend) and running in to the same problems. I built one application with Angular 1, which had good documentation but seemed to be overcomplicated and had too much "magic" going on under the hood for my liking. I'm now trying React; the main React documentation is great but the documentation for supporting libraries is horrible. I have also encountered the problem of every example doing things differently, highly-opinionated tutorials, and (as I mentioned elsewhere) everything seems to be a slightly different alphabet soup of supporting packages. It has been hell for someone who normally tries to find the "best" way to do things.