I think it depends a lot on the kind of app you're building. Many of these tools start to shine for larger and more complicated projects that are being developed by many engineers over a long period of time. The web community is pretty large, so there's constant competition over different ideas and approaches. For most tools and libraries, I usually read through the docs when I hear about it and create a mental index that it exists, in case I ever need to solve a problem for which it would be a good fit.
I'll note that plenty of these tools and libraries have been around longer than two years. If I remember correctly, Webpack came out in 2012 and React in 2013. I point out these two projects because they caused a fundamental shift in the way I approached web development, and neither is looking like it'll be going away soon.
My suggestion would be to try out create-react-app [0]. There's still some stumbling points, but it does a good job of showcases the general direction many people in the webdev development community have moved towards. It hides all the build stuff into a black box. As you become more comfortable with the ecosystem and the need arises, you can eject and access all these tools directly.
I totally agree that the webdev community should strive to do a better job at explaining the purpose of all these tools, but I don't think this problem is limited to them in the slightest. In fact, I can assure you I feel the exact same way you do when I look at many of these cloud / devops / server / backend tools.
Do I want chef, puppet, or ansible? Oh, but you need better dynamic configuration management and service discovery, so be sure to pick up consul or etcd. Remember KVM, jails, and vagrant? All those are dead, containers are the new hotness, say hello to Docker. If you wanna be web scale you'll really need Kubernetes, cuz you wanna be like Google, right? But also check out Deis or Flynn, so you can build your own cloud in the cloud. There's a few other HashiCorp products with nice-looking sites, but I don't even understand the problems they solve well enough to even try poking fun at em. Let's not forget databases! Remember MySQL? It cloned itself and changed its name to Maria. But it turns out that it totally sucks and everyone is using PostgreSQL. Those won't work if you're trying to be web scale, turns out RDBMs are a thing of the past, the future is all about NoSQL. Try out Mongo, it's so easy to use! But be sure to also check out Cassandra, CouchDB, and RethinkDB. They're all NoSQL, but different, but still the same [1]. If you're really set on being like Google, then CockroachDB is the only serious choice anyway. Is anything going slow? You'll have to add some caching with redis or memcached. It's time to jump on the real-time train too, so you'll need some pubsub magic, luckily you can use kafka, rabbitmq, or redis. I'll stop now, since I think this is already way too long. However, I'll note I didn't even mention big data, analytics, or monitoring.
[0] https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app
[1] http://imgur.com/QXLL0XJ