This sentiment is so old and played out.
It’s not just front end developers though. I think other domains and their frameworks went through the same thing. This is just the time for front end.
Plus, there are a lot of people writing JS. It’s not a tiny community fracturing itself over different ways of doing things, and becoming destined for obscurity. It’s tens or hundreds of thousands of developers. In a community this big I’d say having a few choices is a sign of health.
Python is 30. Django is 16.
I’m just picking a few frameworks and languages I’ve used in the past and are still used. Obviously there are still new frameworks and libraries that come out for these languages. But sometimes the big projects fold those in. Or they write their own or whatever. I can pick the popular names and do pretty much what I need.
JavaScript is 25. But most of that time we weren’t doing what we can now. And most frameworks are fairly young. Angular is 11. But most people (and jobs) have jumped ship to React(8) and now there is Svelte(4) which also looks good. And I think there will be more changes to come.
These JS frameworks aren’t exactly veterans that are impossible to supplant. Not yet anyway.
Plus you know all these front end frameworks are "just HTML/ JS/CSS" right?
Most of the popular frontend frameworks (Vue, React, Angular, Svelte) have been around for years at this point. It is like arguing Ruby on Rails vs Spring Boot.
React is 8 years old
Vue is 8 years old
Svelte is the relative newcomer, at 4 years (and the major third version at ~2 years).
The idea of "frameworks are changing every week" hasn't been true in a very long time
Anyone that's worked in a reasonably sized FE codebase can very clearly understand that changing your framework is essentially migrating a huge production DB but on steroids.
Where exactly have you seen a team of developers change their front end framework every week?
First off, you don't have to go learning every framework out there. Pick one and stick with it, or just go vanilla. That said, The features these frameworks provide gives a boost in productivity that far outweighs the low learning curve.
My pick was VueJS and I'm very happy with it. Using Single File Components is pretty similar to vanilla HTML/JS/CSS. Beginners that were under my guidance (with only HTML/CSS/JS experience) usually pick it up and were productive in the same day.
I disagree that React (JSX) is most similar to vanilla JS/HTML at all (I don't prefer it, but to each their own). Vue and Svelte are much further on the side of a vanilla-ish approach.