One of the consequences of The Singularity is that new things get invented faster than the information about them can be disseminated and absorbed. The question is not how to slow this down. The question is how to cope.

I think a lot of the author's problem is that he's still approaching the web as a tool user, not as a tool creator. We have this artificial delineation between "back end" and "front end" developers, and "front end" developers are often treated as lesser. There is a huge emphasis on "don't reinvent the wheel", which I tend to think is more of a cry for help from the speaker that they don't understand what is going on and don't want the waters muddied for them any more than they already are. I even see people--styling themselves as expert front-end developers--questioning whether so-called "pure JavaScript developers" will be able to understand the changes coming with ES2015. Even people within the discipline don't think they/we are "real" developers.

I write text editors, compilers, and 3D graphics code in browsers. I built one of the first SVG-to-VRML-to-HTML/CSS transpilers. I built one of the first Canvas polyfills in 2007 by adapting code I already had from 3 years prior. I've built module systems and task systems (which are totally not hard problems at all). Over the last 10 years, I've probably built 5 of these things, each. I don't think of myself as a "front-end developer" or a "web developer" or any kind of "developer" other than what particular project I'm working on at the time. I'm a "simulation developer" when I'm working on simulation, whether that's in C or C# or JavaScript, it doesn't matter. I'm a "game developer" when I'm writing games, whether that is for PC or a stupid microcontroller or running inside of a CodePen session.

All of this is not to say "I'm awesome." I think I'm rather much average. The point of what I'm trying to say is: you cope with the rapid pace of change by understanding the principles. I can look at a Grunt or Gulp, a Babel or TypeScript, a React or Angular, and I can understand it very quickly, because they aren't magic. I know the way these things are built. Learning the particular systems is just finding the particular choices in those wheelhouses that the developers made for their particular cases.

This used to be a key component to computer science education. And in most cases, it still is. But a lot of people are coming to software development through paths other than computer science. And a lot of those that did come through CS have also drank the koolaid that academic stuff is not relevant in fast-paced industry. No. No no no no. It's the academic stuff that is your life vest in the deluge. But this lack of CS fundamentals is increasingly common, and especially so in the web/front-end world, specifically because it's becoming more accessible.

These things, this process, this overwhelming pace of progress, this is the point. This is what you want. The web isn't too big. Our capability of grasping it is too small. In the 60s and 70s, computer hobbyists could know everything there was to know about computers. By the 80s, only the truly dedicated could keep up with everything. By the 90s, the successful people gave up on trying to keep track of everything and chose a discipline in which to specialize.

The web today is no different, and that is a great thing. The web is no longer a document deployment system. It's an application platform. One that runs on every computer consumer users care to talk about. I can write one set of code that successfully and meaningfully runs on desktops, smartphones, and VR headsets. The browser has fulfilled the promise of Java.