By the time something becomes popular its been around for awhile. As far as I'm concerned the time to start taking advantage or at least learning is well before everyone starts saying its "production ready". I agree that we can't learn every new awesome technology. But I think that people have the tendency to find reasons to excuse learning the new technologies, like saying its not production ready or something. Just because you don't have time to learn and carefully evaluate a new technology doesn't mean you need to dismiss it. Just say "looks like it might be great but I can't say for sure because I don't have time to learn how to use it and then evaluate it.". Its just impossible to try every new thing. You don't need an excuse.

If you wait until most people are saying its production ready, that's because most people are already using it in production. If you wait until that point to start learning it then you will be behind.