Unfortunately I can't cheer you up except to say that I sympathize. I enjoy many different facets of programming but trying to understand modern web development

Unfortunately I can't cheer you up except to say that I sympathize. I enjoy many different facets of programming but trying to understand modern web development makes me want to tear my hair out, it feels like it's almost designed as a "moat" where you have to specifically specialize in the area to understand best practices and why they exist. I do enjoy JavaScript, and I've found much more happiness sticking to the absolute minimum for personal projects: vanilla JS or sometimes React + JSX without NPM.