i agree.
.net is a cathedral platform, well manicured by a small trusted force that tries to make eveything fit together, that works semi-cohesively, to produce a manufactured industrially syitable one-solution to everything.
js is a bazaar language, that had many intertwingular existences in different places, doing different in similar things in thousands of different ways. it's innovation & history is chaotic & messy, with many onetime behemoths left by the wayside (jquery, gulp/grunt, backbone, moment, request). everything is a bit messy & organic & grown together, pieces breaking off & advancing one direction then being woven back with another library to work a third way.
> There's no way around this problem but to dedicate hours every month to keep everything on the bleeding edge.
i dont disagree.
work has spent considerable time dragging a couple dozen old fairly complex react apps & services we inherited out from node 6, node 8 this year, freshening things up.
it is however amazing how much stuff did just work. how many deps we could look through the changelog on, say, that's fine, and upgrade, and tests pass & on deployment things keep moving along. did we get bleeding edge? eh, like 50% of the time. in many cases we didnt even bother trying to get current. we checked dependabot vulnerabilities & did what we had to, stayed in the past for now. these apps were all running, live, with traffic... it's amazing how much of this messy organic tangle does work.
we did run into some of the version conflicts & problems, some of the conservative concerns, the reasons for fear & trepidation you cite. it wasnt fun work. no one wanted to be here. but we got through it in quick order, and it ended up being a whole lot less pain than us engineers expected & budgeted for. we were left with the impression of ease. confidence grew.
as others have tried to point out, i dont think your real complaint is with JS specifically. the organic nature of this world doesnt suit your desires. and i think that's a reasonable stance, these arent unreasonable values/complaints. but on the other hand, the organic has, i think, taken over with rightful cause. Azure OS is in huge part React, huge part JS. the tech adapts much faster. not being a carefully staged industrially-focused cathedral, being an organic place that values & cherishes idea & potential, has let us try a lot of things & keep exploring where real value is, and has kept leading us to better places. we understand more through the experimentalness of the process, we see such vistas that the cathedral makers could not have dreamed, find higher heights & ascend. & yes, sometimes as we rise above the clouds, we spy yet higher peaks, and we must decide whether & how long to stay where we are, or to try again, move onwards.
personally this organic world has brough me great joy & a wonderful continual sense of progress. that we have kept honing ourselves, reshaping. it feels finally like we are starting to really settle down more, that we have made finer cuts at iteration. apis are much more stable. the platform has amassed a more solid core, as groups like WinterCG bless & spread more of the much developed web platform as stable trustworthy systems. React has spent years building towards Suspense & it seems uncharacteristically humble, for a framework that had iterated so much & so heavily for so long, & there's little on the radar that gives us a sense there will be a next breathtaking new era. the organic has settled, become over time more like the cathedral you might have hoped for.