I fully agree. I had that "click" moment with react that really made larger, more complex interfaces seem manageable. Granted that it's still not easy, but most of the time complex apps are tricky to develop and maintain, making sure that they work across a whole load of different devices and their varying screen sizes.

With the huge number of frameworks/libraries/guidelines out their for JS developers, if you can't find a combination that works for you... then front-end work just isn't for you. A lot of people moan about the massive choice of frameworks and libraries. But even the most popular, most maintained and most loved ones will be replaced in a number of years. So find your combination, learn it inside out and ride it's wave until it's time to learn something new that changes paradigms and mindsets.

I feel the same way... web development was hard, until I've learned about es6/babel, webpack, redux and react (I'm using morphdom as react replacement, but idea is the same). Now web dev is easy and fun. I have state, components, events and routes. That's it. Update the state and stay calm.

The idea to concisely manage the state together with dom diffing, are my personal favorite game changers.

Can you provide some guidance/links to a backend Java developer who wants to learn & use a quality long-term, front-end tech stack? Is there a kickstart example project for your preferred stack? Note that I prefer to avoid nodeJS for any back-end production use but am ok with it as part of the dev toolchain, if required. Thank you.

I would say just start with the React tutorial and use the react-create-app (uses webpack etc in the background and is a npm package) that they use in it. Then after the tutorial I would go into the docs and read through them and maybe test some.

After that I would pick the state management tool I want. Either Redux or Mobx as both are popular and have their advantages and disadvantages. I think it is worth going through both their official tutorials as they are pretty good.

https://facebook.github.io/react/tutorial/tutorial.html

http://redux.js.org

https://mobx.js.org

There are of course tons of videos but I think the official tutorials are a great start and using react-create-app instead of trying to dig into webpack and all that is really good at the beginning.

Stick to https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app/ and you'll be golden. If you need more config later, you can "eject", but this is a one-command-and-go kind of thing that is well maintained and works great.

Try Expo at expo.io. It's similar to create-react-native-app but gives you a nice simple tool to preview your app.