This resonates so much. I support some JS packages but I often wonder how anyone gets anything done in general on the JS side, and why people seem to accept the state of affairs. I'm spending most of my time with Ruby and it is night and day.
People get stuff done in JS by sidestepping all the bullshit. If you keep your tooling simple and use a minimal amount of dependencies, then JS is one of the languages/environments with the least bloat, not the most.
The big problem JS has is the same one PHP used to have when it was top dog. Everyone is a fucking noob, including all the people writing all the advice online. I find almost every JS resource to be unbearably bad, with the sole exception of MDN. The vast majority of my learning these days comes from work colleagues who also have a decent level of mastery.
So the real answer is probably that the people getting stuff done are happy with the current state of affairs, because it works for them. And the people that are unhappy are for the most part trying to change the current state of affairs without fully understanding it, and making it worse. I think every language suffers from this to some extent, JS just has a much worse ratio of masters to beginners so the effect is exacerbated.
