In the early and mid-2010s, building a web front end in JavaScript meant choosing among a fast-moving parade of frameworks, each presented as the new right way to do things. The release record alone shows how compressed this period was. Google’s AngularJS, billed on its own site as a “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework,” was developed across roughly 2010 to 2021. Facebook introduced React in a blog post dated June 5, 2013, positioning it not as a full framework but as “a library for building composable user interfaces.” Vue followed soon after: its own FAQ records that “it was created by Evan You in 2014 as a personal side project.”
Three major, competing approaches to the same problem all arriving within about four years, on top of earlier libraries and a steady stream of supporting build tools, produced a now-famous developer mood often called JavaScript framework fatigue. The feeling was that no sooner had a team learned one stack than the community had moved on to the next, with accompanying changes to tooling, package managers, and recommended patterns.
The churn was not only about the frameworks themselves. Each shift tended to drag along new build configurations, new conventions, and new debates about the “correct” architecture, so the cost of keeping current felt high even for experienced developers. The phenomenon became a running theme in conference talks and blog posts of the era.
The deeper cause was structural. The web platform and the JavaScript language were both evolving quickly, and competition among large companies and independent authors pushed rapid experimentation. The same forces that gave the web powerful new front-end tools also produced the fatigue, because progress and instability arrived together.