[komon]

What you're observing is not the rise and fall of best practice and good engineering. All you're seeing is the hype cycle.

Best practice and good engineering in web dev is the same as it is in any other software field: the best stack is the one you know cold.

Unfortunately, there are many popular stacks, and all of them have something to say about all the others. And 80% of learning materials for any given stack aren't from official sources, but are instead blog posts and videos and tweets from tech influencers. When they parrot those same criticisms, it lends the air of a grassroots shifting of the whole community.

The fact of the matter is that despite the huge levels of hype flux, large, popular, stable apps are still being made with technology "boring" tech.

Despite SPAs, rails and Django apps are still built rendering server side templates and sprinkling jQuery where necessary. Despite GraphQL, REST APIs are still the state of the art for most APIs. Despite kubernetes and docker, many apps are still deployed to heroku or VPS providers.

It can be intimidating for newcomers because it can be difficult to separate hype from fact. My advice is to pick something, the more boring the better, and know it cold and ignore all claims of its death.

To address concerns about projects dying, that is pretty legitimate. Unfortunately webdevs deploy trusted code into a highly untrustworthy and antagonistic environment. New technologies do come to play and requires adapters and plugins to be written. I wouldn't worry about overall size of community as long as security issues are getting addressed.