A good way to not be completely overwhelmed by all the new tooling and frameworks is to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, here are three foundational resources:

"You don't know JS": https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

"How browsers work": https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowser...

"High performance browser networking": https://hpbn.co/