I haven't worked with Java for a long time, but from what I've been hearing from colleagues who are exploring writing production software with it, .NET Core is currently a bit of a mess, showing that even coherent dev stories can easily slip into disorder.
It's the field that is progressing rapidly. Browsers are constantly adding new APIs, problems are being solved, etc. The difference is that it's open source
> a lack of strong stewardship/leadership
You can't have leadership in a field which has no owner. It's not like Oracle owning Java and deciding what happens with it.
> people reinventing the wheel.
This is a stereotype by people who don't really know the subject. Every new tool improves on the previous one. For example, grunt was the first JS build tool, it had some issues (huge configurations, and speed) some someone invented gulp, which uses streams for speed and code instead of configuration. But streams don't handle splitting files in bundles and other problems so well, so webpack was invented. There are overlaps but they all solve different problems, and all improve on the previous generation. They are not "reinventing the wheel"
Snark aside, just because a product exists doesn't mean it's perfect, it doesn't mean that it can't be improved on.
Gulp is significantly easier to work with than make for many usecases, and tools like webpack aren't really comparable to make.
There's lots of strong leadership. React, Angular, Vue, Ember, etc. all have very intelligent, hard-working people backing them. These frameworks aren't "reinventing the wheel", it's the complete opposite: the community has finally freed itself of jQuery/global scope/imperative DOM and these frameworks are all pushing the border in one way or another.