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Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or needlessly abrasive. Anyway, it doesn't really matter how supposedly intuitive something is if the actual experience of using it results in the pain expressed by the author's friend. It's called usability because it's about the user. FWIW I've been writing JS for 12+ years and I resonate a lot with the post. Taking random error strings and plugging them into google often takes you on a long winding path of hair-pulling until you eventually give up. It's painful. Anyone who thinks it's painless should reflect on where they sit on the dunning-kruger distribution.

The JS eco-system is in a very elongated (and necessary) growth phase, and right now it's still incredibly hard to "just make things work" if you're starting out. With each year that passes it gets more complicated. Having a fundamental understanding of it all becomes less possible; one must pick a framework and compiler and just stick to that otherwise you're lost in the woods. And heaven forbid you take a long sabbatical, because when you return everything will have changed.

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I have been across the block, from x86 asm to front-end and back-end JS stacks 20 miles high with preprocessors and dependencies. I haven't ever always done JS. I've dabbled in everything, so that hiatus you talk of, I've taken it many times over. I know the hell well that you speak of when learning some new vertically stacked artifact like the JS ecosystem.

But I have no sympathy here because of the fundamental lack of cursory research or attempts done to grok what the node command does, versus the npm command. Jumping right in is a fine method but it doesn't call for complaints or a blog post. One should have an implicit understanding that jumping in without preparing, means a lot of stupid mistakes are going to be had.

Get used to going from first principles would be my advice. Elon Musk did a lot by following that maxim. The same technique cuts through all the ecosystem bullshit when you stop letting the confounding and confusion depress and unravel oneself.

"Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room..." Andrew John Wiles

Dealing with these ecosystems is very similar to that. But all the dark rooms are similar to each other in spirit of shadows and highlights - so the more dark rooms one acclimates to, the less the future ones cause complaining, stress, or vitriol.