Echo JS 0.11.0

Well... It depends on what you mean with "plenty", I guess.
Because while I have no doubt that you and your peers managed to keep up with new technologies, many old-school developers actually struggled a lot with the ways of JavaScript, in terms of async code, functional programming and single-thread techniques.

JavaScript gave birth to some of the most exotic frameworks and introduced revolutionary development stacks. From React to Angular, from jQuery to Elm, from Browserify to Webpack, from Grunt to Gulp... an unprecented flexibility.

Also add isomorphic code, JWTs, WebSockets, PWAs, the end of the boundaries between JS, HTML and CSS... It's no surprise if someone gets dizzy.

But really, it's not a series of hacks. Personally, I can work with it just fine.
Developing for Wordpress feels like a series of hacks and monkey patches. But if you're saying that for modern web development, chances are you're not getting the hang of it!

And that's fine! It's normal, really. Just take your time and stick with one technology for as long as you need to be comfortable with it.