[hughrlomas]

As someone who has been working primarily with JS since the "First Age" of this article, I can say that from my perspective things have improved by orders of magnitude.

New language features are obvious improvements. The paradigm shift from imperative UI management like jQuery to declarative UI management like React has eliminated entire categories of concerns.

Almost everything you see mentioned in the "Second Age" might be easy to take for granted if you've recently arrived, but they have not always been there. While they are not perfect, to say things haven't improved is shortsighted. From the high-level view we are making major strides.

It's an iterative process, where some things win out, new ideas and "flavors of the month" gain footing or wither and die. jQuery for example had competition from mootools, prototype.js, and others, but jQuery established dominance for a variety of reasons. It won mind-share by being the best implementation to solve a class of problems the community was tackling at the time.