I rely on a newsletter, JavaScript Weekly, to learn about new and cool libraries but these sorts of roundup announcements can highlight established libraries that I'd forgotten about.
Some of these like Slick and Hammer.js have been around for quite a while, but it's nice to know it's still going strong.
I don't write a lot of js these days and don't keep up with what's going on in the ecosystem, so overviews such as this one are actually quite interesting at times.
I'm not sure it is - I initially agreed with you as I've perceived it cropping up a lot recently, then checked c8d3f7b49897918's feed and saw that it actually hasn't been 'shilled' much, at least by her/him [1].
I think in my case at least it's just because I happened to have been searching through JS-related threads a lot over the past few weeks and have derived a false pattern :)
I've been pretty disciplined about not shilling it too frequently. You can check my comment history.
I don't enjoy it, but a well timed shill is what got it to the front of hacker news one day, and got it a ton of exposure. When you are a solo dev without the reach of facebook, google or 37signals, you do what you have to do to get the word out.
Especially since you are all doing web programming wrong. ;)
Some of these like Slick and Hammer.js have been around for quite a while, but it's nice to know it's still going strong.