Good luck with a Vue 2 + vuex + Vue Router project scaffolded with Vue CLI in 2016 which NPM is screaming at you is full of vulnerabilities. Or that React + React Router + Redux + Webpack 3 project from 2015.
In both cases you'd need to spend serious time moving to newer deps, rearchitecturing, probably moving to Vite, etc.
Sounds absolutely brutal for sure. I didn't mean to sound like everything was fine in JavaScript land, they have been chasing the shiny new thing and focusing too much on the wrong abstractions for a while. Even backend frameworks aren't free from this same problem, when you look at the support and migration woes in big players like rails/laravel/django. I suppose thats less frequent though.
I'm not sure how you avoid it in any framework without rawdogging pure HATEOAS and vanilla concepts. Recently I've gravitated towards Django and HTMX and its felt quite refreshing.
Keeping your tech stack up to date inevitably brings some pain and suffering along. I do wish more frontend frameworks cared about backwards compatibility.
The web dev influencers really push the latest and greatest memes. One day they are putting out a video of how Firefox is the worst browser in the world because it doesn't support some niche variety of CSS gradient and the next they are gushing over something like Zen (a Firefox fork).
I agree. I don't know what the solution is either. I've been asking myself this question for some years now.
Last year, after 10 or so years using Node, I concluded that JS in the backend was a mistake and I had mostly wasted those years. I'm currently migrating towards another stack.
It's more difficult for the frontend. Inevitably you end up needing JS unless the project works as static HTML with close to no interactivity. I still haven't properly tested HTML over wire solutions though.
In both cases you'd need to spend serious time moving to newer deps, rearchitecturing, probably moving to Vite, etc.