Nothing is forcing you to use the trendiest JS libraries. Feel free to do your side projects in vanilla JS or with whatever library you want.

The constantly churning and evolving JS ecosystem isn't necessarily a bad thing, although it does demand some attention. On the flip side, there is a lot of pre-written reusable code and more gets added daily.

From an ecosystem point of view, elm doesn't hold a candle to JS. Also, you don't have to learn every single JS library out there. You don't have to use redux-sagas. Use whatever you want.

Yes, I know there are a lot of tools and a lot of options and that can be exhausting. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.