I sometimes yearn for the days of the simple script tag that seemingly gave us the world at our fingertips. Especially when I have spent hours trying to get too

I sometimes yearn for the days of the simple script tag that seemingly gave us the world at our fingertips. Especially when I have spent hours trying to get tooling to work alone. The constant updates, deprecation of libraries and tools before they even hit version 1.0, it can be tedious. Having said that, I think in the case of the direction of Javascript itself: I believe it is going in the right direction. ECMAScript 2015 was a mammoth release that really took Javascript in a nice direction, the smaller ES2016 release adds a few minor features and ES2017 is shaping up to be another monumental release for Javascript. The ecosystem as you mention is really in a confusing state at present. The only constant in all of this is Javascript. We are living in an era where things are being deprecated before they even hit 1.0. The one part of front-end development heading in the wrong direction is the questionable design choices of frameworks like Angular and React. The only framework I have seen which is abiding by actual web standards is Aurelia. The lack of Aurelia specific concepts means you're not committing to something proprietary you're stuck using, like the case with Angular 2 and ReactJS. Then you have the elephant in the tooling room: Webpack. People are using it, it is becoming increasingly popular in the front-end space, but it has basically no documentation and it is incredibly confusing. People are using it, without even understanding it or knowing how to use it. Mostly learning from blog posts and StackOverflow. Webpack 2 looks promising, but it probably won't have any documentation either. It is almost like nobody seems to plan anything, choosing to develop and release off of the cuff. Even when Babel dramatically broke things out and changed the way it works for v6, that was a painful experience for the ecosystem in itself. Then you have System.js, JSPM and other tooling/module loaders breaking things every release.