Implicit in this laundry-list of technologies is that learning the technologies implies you will be good at frontend dev.
This is simply not true and encourages the incorrect philosophy that knowing technologies makes you a good developer.
Aspiring frontend devs should just practice building and maintaining stuff, not worry too much about the technology, and that itself would put them on the fast track to becoming better developers. Along the way they will encounter problems and evaluate the pros and cons of various solutions to solve those problems. That's the valuable experience you need to be a successful frontend developer - not simply knowing what gulp or angular is.
If you want to be a successful front end developer you need to learn JavaScript. The more JavaScript you know, the more valuable you will be. If you know JavaScript then you can pick up Angular / React / Gulp / Node / Backbone / whatever web tech someone needs.
Having experience with a specific technology might help you, but I'd hire a JavaScript expert with no experience in my tech stack more than an someone who has become an expert in a specific framework / library.
I agree. If you can come to grok CSS, HTML, and Javascript, there's no limit on the abstractions around those three concepts that you can pick up.
As an anecdote, I am not a front end developer. I try and shy away from it as much as possible; I don't have the design chops to make my own designs, and I dislike the chains of following someone else's design to the pixel. That said, I was able to pick up an abandoned sass/React/Flux/gulp/bower/lodash/... project built up by an intern and make it work in under a day.
Because I knew the basics, I could follow the execution path, consulting documentation where necessary, and figure out why things didn't work.
Learn the basics; it makes understanding the abstractions easier.
I think implicit in "learning JavaScript" is learning patterns. This is not picked up through books (except perhaps one of the patterns books), but through experience, reading good code, and talking with other developers.
Implicit in this laundry-list of technologies is that learning the technologies implies you will be good at frontend dev.
This is simply not true and encourages the incorrect philosophy that knowing technologies makes you a good developer.
Aspiring frontend devs should just practice building and maintaining stuff, not worry too much about the technology, and that itself would put them on the fast track to becoming better developers. Along the way they will encounter problems and evaluate the pros and cons of various solutions to solve those problems. That's the valuable experience you need to be a successful frontend developer - not simply knowing what gulp or angular is.