I feel you. Tooling for programming often seems to presume that programming is your primary focus and that you can afford to spend time every month keeping up with changes. For a small passion project the overhead of this churn eats a large fraction of the time budget, not to mention the demotivation of realizing how much energy you are spending to essentially tread water.

Whereas with art or math or writing projects I can come back to old notes decades later and basically pick up where I left off.