None of the productive developers I know care about all the daily/weekly noise, if something is truly new and good it'll become known on a monthly or quarterly scale.
And about job description - developers are hired to build functionality, not learn new things. It might help further your personal goals and eventually help provide functionality faster/better using new tools but at the end of the day, the business doesn't care and would rather have something that works. Don't get caught up in the hype. It's great that you seem so passionate about it but keep in mind what the work is really about.
I imagine most here have day jobs with projects that last more than a few months so I doubt the need to learn things faster than your cycles of your job.
True, but unless you own the business, the business' goals are not your goals. The business wants a working product; you need to stay relevant in a career. Sometimes these may align, but not always.
When I hire devs, I base their relevancy on what functionality and results they produced for their employer/project, not how new their tech stack was.
Go ahead and learn new stuff but if you know the fundamentals, the frameworks are just different syntaxes for the same thing. But don't assume that someone who doesnt keep up with things every day or week is somehow irrelevant. These frameworks won't change your productivity that much and your output is what matters.
Family and kids are, by any measure, a huge time and energy sink. But that too is also important work that must be done, even if it has professional costs.
The guys writing these new things, more often than not, don't have a family and kids and do have all that extra time. If you have committed to a family and kids, then join a shop where family people work and be content to use yesterday's stuff to get work done, it will still work fine for the most part. You don't have to keep up with everything, perhaps just general trends. Just watch out for that gentle slide into irrelevancy. ;)
I would argue that wasting time learning the JS "framework of the day" is not the best approach to stay relevant. Learn the logic and math behind programming and you can watch the industry slowly catch up...
I was recently at a jobs fair and spoke to a lot of companies and everyone (apart from one) were saying they wanted developers who had the core fundamentals and could learn any framework or language (the latter obviously takes longer but not much longer). So they weren't putting an emphasis on having to know the latest frameworks even if they were using them, but instead looking for people with knowledge of core concepts.
Yeah. No wonder people figure out that it is not the right career path for them when people will jump on them for admitting any kind of "programmer weakness"[1], or for not being perfectly passionate about programming all the time, or for not thanking their boss for having the privilege of getting their generous pay-check and almost salivating at getting more overtime to work on the companies' interesting problems.
Sometime the work itself might not be as bad as the people you have to do it with.
[1] In their minds.
Every two weeks? Try every day. I hate to be that guy, but this sounds like whining. You're a developer, it's an incredible privilege (we're part of one of the fastest-growing, most-successful businesses ever, and we basically get paid to solve puzzles by writing machines directly from our minds and in most dev shops I've worked in nobody cares if you roll in at 10am, not to mention that we get compensated quite well while arguably becoming ultimately smarter than doctors yet without any required certification or schooling... I mean, in the history of human jobs, I can't imagine it getting much better!!), and staying on top of new developments is part of our job description. If you're getting fatigued, perhaps it's time to take that vacation you've been putting off, or to (wo)man-up and ask your superiors for more. Or to ask yourself if this is the right career path for you (although there's so much work now that you can get by just fine even relying on decades-old technology/libraries/languages). OR... to specialize. The full-stack developer's days are unfortunately numbered, there's no way a full-stack developer can keep up with every new development while keeping his job anymore. I myself gave up on keeping up with frontend around the time Angular came out...