It really depends on what your goal is. You don't need to buy into any of it and still write high quality software. Concat & minify is still there like it always was (what tools you use to get this done is really irrelevant). You don't need to use Node, NPM, webpack, rollup, babel/buble or classes because today that means you're obligated to use all the tooling and compilation. Not to say that these things dont add value, but the value is greatly overhyped for projects that are not Facebook or Google sized. Virtual dom, Promises, rAF, Canvas, CSS3, new web APIs are definitely worth learning because they provide huge value and will be around for a long time. There has certainly been a shift towards declarative/functional/immutable paradigms in JS but that doesnt mean it works better for all cases.

Might as well do a shameless plug here. If you don't want to learn the current hotness-of-the-month. I've written domvm [1] to be small, fast, fully free from dependencies and build/tooling requirements. It uses virtual dom concepts under the hood, so you get the benefits of both declarative templates and imperative views in pure JS and a very small learning curve.

Believe me when I tell you that you can still write complex-yet-maintainable, performant web-apps with just your browser and vim/notepad w/syntax coloring.

If you're looking to be employable, though, you'll probably need to learn Angular/React/Vue and everything that comes with them ;)

[1] https://github.com/leeoniya/domvm