Granted, once I understood the ecosystem more, I gradually began to grasp the reason these issues are around. But still, it does make it incredibly frustrating as a reasonably decent coder getting started in JavaScript.
Things have largely gotten much, much better for JavaScript though ever since Node and NPM came along. It's easier to find the right modules to use or at least the right ideas to borrow. Package overload paralysis still happens at times, but I'd personally always rather have more, rather than less choice.
The constant rate of change does make me feel like I'm always re-learning a new way to do the same old job, but luckily for me - learning potentially better ways of doing the same old thing continues to be enjoyable.
I mostly work on the backend.. However, I've done a decent amount of JS too. In fact, back in 2015, even built a lot of the core parts of an SPA using a mix of knockout & requirejs with minified bundles and dynamic loading and so on. Given that it stuff put together from scratch, I though picking things up after a couple of years away from js would be easy. Oh how wrong I was...
In 2017/18 sought to write a starter boilerplate with vue 2, Typescript and .NET Core. I would have probably spent an order of magnitude effort more fixing build issues and warnings than on the project. Once you hit bugs/issues with 3rd party webpack modules (which is almost a given), it is not fun at all.
I recently had to put up a one page visualization and was not looking forward to it. Surprisingly, create-react-app just worked out of the box. Not much of a data point - but still a pleasant experience.
create-react-app is the only thing I've used in the ecosystem that hasn't catastrophically broken for me due to some years-old issue.
Except for monorepos/yarn workspaces, that still doesn't have first class support[0]
[0] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/1333