What specifically do you get in return for a critical dependency only being supported for 2 or 3 years? Are there new conceptual advances in UI design requiring cutting edge support libraries to implement?
The reason why these frameworks are constantly changing or being replaced is because the browsers and web standards are constantly evolving. Right now there is a major push from big players such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft to move things towards the cloud, and as a result they are introducing more and more features to the browser. As a result of this push, a framework that was written 3 years ago with a different set of capabilities in mind, no longer makes sense.
And like I said, if for your product it doesn't make sense to adopt a new technology, you are welcome to stick with an older framework, that is why they are open source! If you need official support, then you are welcome to use one of the many commercially available frameworks from Sencha or Telerik.
You can laugh all you want, but it doesn't make my point invalid. People like you act like this is a holy war, and only you are capable of seeing the truth. Well NEWS FLASH! Web developers are not STUPID, most of us realize that on the web client development side things move fast, however, that is the nature of the business! Right now there is a lot of innovation going on in this space from lots of big players including Google, Facebook and Microsoft are pushing things towards the cloud. As a result of this push, browsers are evolving fast and a framework that was written 3 years ago with a different web standards in mind no longer make sense.
The reason why Google replaced Angular 1 with Angular 2 (which is not backward compatible) is because back when the wrote Angular 1, there was still a lot of inconsistency between the browsers and features and there was still a lot of reliance on jQuery. With browsers now incorporating a lot of what jQuery offered natively, it made sense to rewrite the framework with modern browser capabilities in mind. And this is still going on as browsers and standards are becoming more mature and browsers are adding more and more capabilities. You might want to argue that the browser is not the right platform for this, but your opinion doesn't matter, because it is the Googles of the world that decide what makes sense. Fact is development is hard, and as a developer you are constantly required to keep up to date and be open to new technologies. If you can't handle it, then maybe it is not the right profession for you.
The browser is and has always been a document viewer.
Well Google, along with Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and millions of other web developers much smarter than you and I disagree with that view...
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.