In this case, the wheel started off with an impractical oval shape and the reinventions are usually making it rounder. If you'd stopped the churn two years ago

In this case, the wheel started off with an impractical oval shape and the reinventions are usually making it rounder. If you'd stopped the churn two years ago, people would be using Bower for front-end package management in addition to NPM, and Gulp or Grunt for task automation. Now a few churns later, NPM is the only package manager you need since you can use Webpack to automatically cut out your duplicated front-end packages. And now NPM provides all the task scripting most devs would need, so no more Gulp or Grunt. Things are getting simpler and easier, but if you're looking from the outside you'll just see a long list of names of tools.