I've been coding my front-ends in React for 5 or 6 years. I don't have any of the problems you describe, I can also pick up old projects and run them without much problem. There was the change from classes to hooks but I still remember classes fairly well. Then there's been NextJS which I've picked up in like a weekend. That's it.
There are new frameworks popping up all the time. Some look very interesting. But React has been around since 2013 and it's a world standard.
I agree that JS/TS tooling is largely a mess, it's why I don't like JS/TS back-ends other than maybe some simple NextJS API routes, or an Express server with something like three files. But on the front-end, React CRA and NextJS (with TypeScript) both have served most of my needs with just a few CLI commands and minimal config. I rarely have the need to meddle with the tooling and I can get up and running in seconds.
I was given a old unmaintained react project to build a pipeline and the only way to run it was on node 12. It would not even build on latest node versions.
JavaScript itself is entirely backwards compatible back to 2002. If anything, I'd argue raw .NET is far worse than raw JS for backwards compatibility, because .NET has depreciated entire languages like VB6.
To compare something like React to .NET, let's look at .NET libraries and frameworks. For example: Sliverlight, WebForms, WPF, WCF SOAP, old versions of EF, or old versions of MVC. It's not been pretty for .NET, and you're in a bad place if you still have a Sliverlight app in 2022 because it only runs on IE11.
Every language and library suffers/benefits from the onward march of progress. It's disingenuous to claim JS is the only ecosystem that has significant churn.
There are new frameworks popping up all the time. Some look very interesting. But React has been around since 2013 and it's a world standard.
I agree that JS/TS tooling is largely a mess, it's why I don't like JS/TS back-ends other than maybe some simple NextJS API routes, or an Express server with something like three files. But on the front-end, React CRA and NextJS (with TypeScript) both have served most of my needs with just a few CLI commands and minimal config. I rarely have the need to meddle with the tooling and I can get up and running in seconds.