> "... the reason why there's so much churn is because smart, inventive people are constantly finding better ways to do things."
It also follows that at some point, these smart, inventive people will come up with fairly stable frameworks that are sufficiently flexible and powerful to accommodate most of the problem space out there. It is reasonable to ask if such a point has been reached...
Depends on the space.. for example, Express has been pretty stable.. Angular 1.x has been as stable as anything else for the most part... Node's mostly been progressive additions, and features from engine updates since 0.10... npm has been pretty stable since node 0.10, though there's been significant advancements since npm 3 came out.
Browserify -> Webpack has been noisy.
Babel 5 -> 6 equally noisy, but better for moving forward
Today, I think webpack, babel, react, redux and fetch cover a LOT of ground for client-side dev. There's a few other bits around that, and I think CSS tooling is starting the a similar shakeup to node's tooling options.
In the end, almost all the JS features I care about seem to be at stage-3 now, so who knows when they'll be in the major browsers.
JavaScript has been around since the 90's; a quick scan of this page reveals around 2 dozen JavaScript technologies. The only solution is to remove JavaScript from all browsers and replace it with Java.
It also follows that at some point, these smart, inventive people will come up with fairly stable frameworks that are sufficiently flexible and powerful to accommodate most of the problem space out there. It is reasonable to ask if such a point has been reached...