It's all just marginal convergence towards "best", and in real practice, most of this "progress" can and should be ignored. For every tool, wait it out until it's been around and still in active use/development/maintenance for at least 5 full years.
But always stay playing. Always try out the new things, because some of them may just scratch a burning itch.
Fear not age, because if you've been around long enough, and are still actively learning, all this new stuff starts looking very much like mere variations of old things.
Perhaps I'm just rusty but age has only made me cautious. I'm responsible for a rather large and complicated UI framework that we use internally. The thing I've discovered over the last 5-6 years is that APIs are volatile as are JavaScript libraries, browsers and security concerns. It's terribly hard picking something that you can rely on. Even jQuery has enough breaking changes for me to have a week long task getting past 1.4.2 on our product. We have over 400 complicated web app pages that need testing to make sure we haven't broken any edge cases.
The learning curve is tough, the maintenance is tougher and the churn is terrible. It's a living hell on a large project. It makes me long for WPF or even Win32 where 20 years without significant reengineering is a good bet.
On the web, the basic DOM API is the most stable. Sacrificing convenience for maintenance these days is what I'm for. Screw the frameworks.
The problem with the frameworks is the very definition of the word. Not every problem/process fits in the workable frame, and then you end up with a pentagon shaped framework with dingles off the end, and nobody knows what the hell you did except you. Better to just write straight prototype OOP and use a preprocessor thatll add KVO to accessors/modifiers if you really need events (which most apps do.)
Emscripten is good for that. And there are many languages that have KVO that will compile to JS using emscripten. Really, JS isn't ideal for large projects, and these frameworks are silly, because they're targeting this lowly base for UI when a better language with better standard libs could be used to do lots of the logic, ie. Clojure.
It the best practice of a wise developer is to wait 5 years before touching a tool then that tool will be tested only by unwise people.
Devote 2% of your time and try out some of the things once in a while; don't bet on them but at least be a small part of the community which will make them either better of fail.
But always stay playing. Always try out the new things, because some of them may just scratch a burning itch.
Fear not age, because if you've been around long enough, and are still actively learning, all this new stuff starts looking very much like mere variations of old things.