The cost of change is real, and I think you've touched on it. When I started developing, Stack Overflow was in its infancy and occassionally had helpful answer

The cost of change is real, and I think you've touched on it. When I started developing, Stack Overflow was in its infancy and occassionally had helpful answers, but "search the internet" was usually the fourth or fifth option when you couldn't find answers using the following: 1. Look through the documentation and/or man pages 2. Look through (one of) the book(s) you have on the subject 3. Ask a knowledgable co-worker (depending on what you're doing) 4. Try a few things to see if you can figure it out. If the source is available, dig through the source code of the framework you're building on. This was especially useful when it was a Qt-related question for example. So I came up with a balance of having theory/foundation in place before starting . There were pros and cons to this approach of course. It meant a bigger investment and higher barriers of entry to learning a new language/framework, but it also meant I would really learn those things and understand them deeply. The javascript world around 2011 or so when I got heavily into it (more than just jQuery, I started learning Backbone.js) was a change. It felt slower then than it does now. My approach of book-based learning worked great for learning Ruby and Rails, but not JS stuff. There just weren't many great focused books, and when I found one it would be outdated quickly or lose relevance (for example, because we moved to Ember.js, and then to React, etc). Eventually I did get the foundation in JS, but it was painful to get at especially with how many levels of abstraction there is (or used to be, now that browsers support a lot of ES6 and above features it's much better). Anyway, all that to essentially say that yes, the javascript world makes this very hard by being so fast-moving and mercilessly fragmented. I feel mostly insulated from that world now that I'm mainly doing Elixir (Phoenix and LiveView), but if you're doing anything web it's impossible to avoid it entirely. If Alpine.js disappears I'll be much regressed!