[jgon]

As I understand the reason they switched to the year based naming is because they plan to do yearly standards now, switching to a release date based model rather than a feature based model. C++ has kind of switched to this model too, where features that are ready to go for the release date are included, and ones that aren't quite baked enough will not hold up the release, to help avoid an ES6 type situation where the committee works for years and years without releasing an update.

So it's not that standards become out of date, especially as in both Javascript and C++'s case, the standards are generally additive. They just add stuff so your old software should continue to work and will not become "out of date".

Anyway, that's the reasoning I've been given behind the change and it makes sense to me. Hopefully that answers the question for you as well.