Well, in ancient ES3 times all we had was functions and so we used functions for everything and that was good as they are extremely versatile. But now a different problem appeared: it's hard to statically analyze function-based constructs for various purposes (tree shaking, refactoring, etc.) so new syntax was invented to capture what was convention inside the language itself. If you look at classes they are "just" syntactic sugar that works just like good ol' prototype system. But the one key difference is that this is now easier to statically analyze.

The same happens with modules although having written several require.js like loaders I find the ES system a little bit lacking.

> I swear, it's like the language reinvents itself every year. Give me some sort of promise when you'll leave the standard alone, then I'll wait for the community to form best practices / libraries to catch up. After the dust settles, I'll invest time reading up on the standard.

Sorry to disappoint you but this will never happen, especially not in JavaScript. Actually the standard is released every year that's why we have ES2015, ES2016... But that's just the way things work in IT: people keep changing things and we are supposed to follow.

> ... seems like a moving target.

Yes, exactly. But that seems to be "by design" rather than "by accident", see Fire and Motion [0].

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/