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At the end of the day, a lot of the details end up on the mental cutting room floor, there's no getting out of it. If you can't specialize, get used to a bit of Swiss cheese brain, but hopefully retaining the 10000 foot overview so you pick the technology back up reasonably fast next time.

The only things that have really helped:

Key takeaways go into a Deck in Anki (spaced repetition).

Lots of notes and/or screenshots in Google Docs for easy searches. (still haven't embraced Evernote)

Bookmarks in Firefox with tags.

Teach someone what you just learned.

One frustration in particular is the time spent wading through minutiae instead of creating something with impact. But sometimes that's part of what we get paid for, navigating / remedying the pain points. Anyone can (eventually) slog through most development technologies, but adding understanding and context and utility to it, that's where the challenge lies.

Heinlein said something to the effect of "specialization is for insects," but increasingly the bulk of world seems to be leaning that way. There's nothing wrong with specialization, but choose wisely. Check out Google Trends on a few technologies over the past 10 years and see their rise and fall.