I love it. It wasn't even that long ago that I used to spend countless hours building everything with the sliding doors method and doing weird hacks to make things work in IE6 or (gasp) IE5. There was a lot less to know, and things were certainly simpler back then, but it was also extremely tedious.
Nowadays I can focus my effort on problems that are actually interesting. There's been an explosion, and with the variety, things have gotten complexed. I understand that it can be cumbersome to those entering the field, and a lot of the time it's total overkill for the problem. But... once you get over the hump, there's now a lot of really cool shit you can do on the web that was completely unrealistic or unimaginable just a few years ago.
Do you not find that you spend far more time now wrangling with new implementations of new frameworks for new concepts, only to discover later that you should've researched more, because you have a problem which an even newer implementation of a newer concept has solved and blah blah blah. The amount of time I've wasted in my life learning things to keep up with Web dev trends...
Frameworks are great, but you have to spend a lot of time wading through the documentation and architecture. Why this is different than that framework and why this does something different than that framework, and why this framework solves something this other framework fucks up.
For a time I just started putting together my own stuff and then realized it was so custom, it was totally useless outside of a particular project. I've come around a little bit, but its frustrating when the whole industry jumps on a bandwagon, promotes the shit out of it and then some time later, they're onto something else and the cycle repeats itself.
The best example for this is Backbone.
It was one of the first JS frameworks I started fooling around with, along with Node and Express. Everybody thought this was the greatest thing ever. Now, less than a year or so after I first started dabbling with it, you can't find anybody still talking about it (even though its still a rock solid framework). Everything is now Angular, React and various other shiny toys. I would say the same thing about Knockout. People thought this was the next big thing, and now I can't find anybody promoting it anymore.
Yes, but none of this is really specific to web development. It's just the nature of being a technologist.
It's really a balancing act of picking the latest and greatest vs. picking the tried and tested. No one wants to learn something that'll be useless in a year. Alternatively if you forego learning anything new then you'll miss out on technologies that can actually help you.
For me, I don't really view learning things as wasted time. Even if I don't use some technology I learned a year or two ago, there's plenty of valuable lessons that can be learned from why things didn't work out.
It would get frustrating if I were learning all the wrong things all the time. So, I focus on the things that genuinely get me excited followed shortly by new technology that isn't completely fresh.
Because sometimes these developments are sensible and change industry "best practice". I cringe terribly thinking back on some of the code I've written using methods which were acceptable at the time, and if I didn't keep up with trends to some extent, I'd still be writing code like that.
Nowadays I can focus my effort on problems that are actually interesting. There's been an explosion, and with the variety, things have gotten complexed. I understand that it can be cumbersome to those entering the field, and a lot of the time it's total overkill for the problem. But... once you get over the hump, there's now a lot of really cool shit you can do on the web that was completely unrealistic or unimaginable just a few years ago.