The frontend ecosystem is definitely less mature than backend. Gmail and Google Maps, two of the first "real" client-side applications, were launched in 2004 and 2005 – so the entire ecosystem is really about a dozen years old. Before that people didn’t really “realize” that JS and web was a real programming environment. That means there's a lot to catch up on and a lot to experiment with as people figure out the best ways to build things. Compare this to backend or infrastructure development which have had decades to develop.

That said – I completely recognize that this can be painful. You don't always need to use the latest stuff though. If a "less fashionable" technology does the job for you, you can definitely use it. And trying to mitigate some of this complexity is why my team works on projects like Create React App which (whether or not you're using React) can insulate you from some of the "churn" that people often feel in the ecosystem.

In React itself, we try to have as few breaking changes as possible. (And our team needs to keep 50,000 components at Facebook working through our changes, which is a major incentive to not break things unnecessarily.) Our last major release, React 16, was released in Sep 2017. But it actually included almost no breakages (we mostly bumped the version number out of caution because it included a huge