I think about it like this: The number of projects is simply a sign of how popular the language / platform is (is becoming). When you start to understand / re

I think about it like this: The number of projects is simply a sign of how popular the language / platform is (is becoming). When you start to understand / recognize the different "types" of projects you'll see they all (generally speaking) fall into probably less than 10 total categories of projects. Your goal is not to understand all of them well, but to understand them well enough to know which ones fit their use cases the best. When I think of these things in this way I can generally dismiss ~90% of the projects after I've read a handful of pages of their documentation to know whether they're on the right track or not. Then, for the ones I've dismissed, if I start seeing those projects pop up more and more on forums like HN I might reassess, but other than that once you get over the steep edge of the learning curve it's no longer intimidating to see so many projects popping up in the ecosystem. EDIT: Or just get your skills to a point where you're confident enough that you understand the fundamentals well enough that you can fit into any project no matter what front-end libraries / frameworks they're using.