It's not really unique to JS. We've had framework churn for a long time in lots of language communities. Look at Java and all the different desktop UI framework

It's not really unique to JS. We've had framework churn for a long time in lots of language communities. Look at Java and all the different desktop UI frameworks and build frameworks it has. .NET has at least three, first-party UI frameworks that are still in active use, not to mention the dozens of 3rd party frameworks in the wild. Don't even get me started on Data Access frameworks. What is unique about the modern era is that A) there are a lot more developers than ever, and B) it's easier to get a niche of other developers into supporting your vanity framework project. So if there were always going to be X% of developers getting behind any particular project, A means that B hits a critical inflection point of N total developers that make it achieve self-sustainability. Once a project becomes self-sustainable, it looks important. But going back to point A, all these new developers don't have the experience necessary to evaluate whether or not a project is worthwhile on its own merits, beyond "well, N number of people use it". For a long time, front-end work was denigrated as "lesser" because it was typically done as an afterthought, foisted on designers, not deemed "important" or "hard" enough for "real" programmers (please note my use of weasel quotes to indicate I don't personally believe it to be so, that's just how the development community has treated it over the years). So, being treated as something of a read-headed step child, the front-end community has lacked a certain level of adult supervision that could help guide its growth in a stable, manageable way. The "blind leading the blind", so to speak, out of complete necessity. I guess it was a little easier in the late 90s and early 00s in that businesses were much more reluctant to use open source code. It was a lot harder to get buy-in on anything that "wasn't invented here". But that doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of "invention" going on. Your job as a developer growing to become a "senior" is to learn how to ignore the churn of shiny new things and do what is right by your projects. This has always been the case.