I think you nailed it. This is something that is pretty unique to the JS world. I think the reason for this is that the entire infrastructure is built on found

I think you nailed it. This is something that is pretty unique to the JS world. I think the reason for this is that the entire infrastructure is built on foundations that are constantly changing. It's impossible to spend even a year refining your infra when the foundation has been replaced at least once in the meantime. Imagine what would happen if the POSIX API's were to change every year instead of every decade or so. We'd have the same mess in the Unix world. In fact, there is one place where this happens, although not as bad as the JS world: mobile development. Coming back to Android after being away for a year forces you to learn a whole new set of API's and most of the things you used to do have now become obsolete. The main difference between JS and mobile is that for JS everybody builds their own frameworks and no one knows what the correct way is.