Maybe I'm missing something really fundamental, but why try to keep up with everything? It's a huge ecosystem and any given dev/team can only use a tiny bit of it. If a library does everything you need it to, does it matter if you're years behind on it? (modulo e.g. security fixes)
I mean, certainly I agree that trying to keep current on everything would be a nightmare. But surely that's just the result of lots of people sharing lots of libraries, right? If other languages don't have the same problem, isn't that just because people aren't sharing as much code?
I think this is true, but JS also "sucks" in different ways, so not keeping up means expending seemingly unnecessary effort in maintainability, reliability, etc.
Angular 1 is impossible to maintain compared to Angular 2, for instance. Angular 1 fixed a lot of problems vanilla js faced. It's all improvements.
I mean, certainly I agree that trying to keep current on everything would be a nightmare. But surely that's just the result of lots of people sharing lots of libraries, right? If other languages don't have the same problem, isn't that just because people aren't sharing as much code?