The web-dev community might discourage that, but in my experience (someone who does backend/analytics and some devops, and who occasionally needs to modify the front-end projects that communicate with said backend) every time I setup one of the projects for local development it's a dependency nightmare and a good couple hours of research to figure out how all these pieces work together.

We've done the jQuery -> Angular -> React mambo. The RoR -> Node.js mambo. The Grunt -> Gulp -> Webpack mambo. The underscore -> lowdash mambo... I could go on. That's without even counting the CSS related fads.

Another thing I've noticed is that we've gone from projects trying to optimize for minimal JS and are light on browser resources, to installing multiple megabytes of Bower/Webpack/NPM dependencies and pages that perform (pardon my French) like crap. Famously, one of our backend devs wrote a Chrome extension that would disable the animated backgrounds in a bunch of stuff because they sucked our laptops' batteries.

So I feel the pain of poster who said it's become almost impossible to support JS projects unless that's your daily job. The tool churn is too big and don't get me started on all the new terms ("isomorphic websites", "polyfills", "shims", etc.) that seem to pop up every couple months.

I understand it's growing pains of a maturing ecosystem, it's just that the churn speed is insane.