I think this is true, but JS also "sucks" in different ways, so not keeping up means expending seemingly unnecessary effort in maintainability, reliability, etc

I think this is true, but JS also "sucks" in different ways, so not keeping up means expending seemingly unnecessary effort in maintainability, reliability, etc. Angular 1 is impossible to maintain compared to Angular 2, for instance. Angular 1 fixed a lot of problems vanilla js faced. It's all improvements.