Agreed. It's more like switching from latex to enamel paint, and then someone inventing a new type of paint that has some better properties, but some worse, and is situational.
Nothing is static for any discipline.
Doctors have a constant influx of new medicines and procedures. The doctor that operated on my wife had heard of a just-in-case tip that ended up saving my wife from having full-blown have-to-get-kemo cancer. Most doctors still don't do it that way, and it's an incredibly rare situation... We got super lucky that that doctor was on the ball.
And while it's not life-threatening, I see the same kind of thing in webdev constantly. New 'best practices' come into effect all the time because of security vulnerabilities, and new tools come into existence to make hard things easier.
Yup, those same tools sometimes make easy things harder, but that's the trade-off. You do not need to make the switch. But it has its benefits.
I agree, once you know the patterns and the foundation of the web new tech is not that hard to adapt to. I agree as a new dev it can feel like a bottomless pit, in the same way low level programming feels for most new devs.
That said web frontend has had a wild ride the past years. But its really starting to stabilize now, around a few core frameworks (react and angular for example). Sure there is still forks and revamps but its not the big world changing differences (like going from jQuery to react was).
Nothing is static for any discipline.
Doctors have a constant influx of new medicines and procedures. The doctor that operated on my wife had heard of a just-in-case tip that ended up saving my wife from having full-blown have-to-get-kemo cancer. Most doctors still don't do it that way, and it's an incredibly rare situation... We got super lucky that that doctor was on the ball.
And while it's not life-threatening, I see the same kind of thing in webdev constantly. New 'best practices' come into effect all the time because of security vulnerabilities, and new tools come into existence to make hard things easier.
Yup, those same tools sometimes make easy things harder, but that's the trade-off. You do not need to make the switch. But it has its benefits.