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Because Javascript runs the web, which is huge.
Conversely, why are there so many back-end programming languages? C#? Java? ColdFusion? PHP? Node? Rust? C++? Ruby? Python? Do we really such have different requirements that there need to be so many!?
Not to say requirements don't play a part - Python exists because of Math/prototyping requirements of people that don't want to worry about memory or complex syntax (generics, etc..)
Javascript language was originally written in ~10 days by Brendan Eich[0]. The limited time meant that it was a bare bones primitive language that did not include an opinionated and standard GUI library . Compare that to how Java and C# gestated internally for years at Sun and Microsoft before the v1.0 of the respective languages were released. With more development time, they included a bigger standard library. Java…
You see this in Javascript and PHP where there are tons of frameworks because the language already has so much built in for the problem space.
Other languages that aren't designed to be web native, general purpose languages, tend to rally around frameworks geared towards opening that problem space to the language.
The first fight was between the closed source and the open community. Open community went blazing fast when compared to big corporates for web application builders. (visual basic/ oracle products / SAP builders...)
Second fight was among the programming language preferences that people adopted. (php/java/la la)
Third fight was between the backend and front end developers. Front end developers raced forward. (zzzzp)
Browser vendors started providing features that front end developers could use and need not rely on backend. Front end developers are playing the fight game effortlessly.
Now, there is a fight between browser vendors and a race among the front end developers.
A fight who will win market share in browser usage and A fight who will gain most of the stars in the github.
Backend developers just sit back with popcorn and enjoying the circus show.
Gee I dunno-- "Why do people ask dumb questions?"
"Every developer is trying to pull the market share towards themselves." The first fight was between the closed source and the open community. Open community went blazing fast when compared to big corporates for web application builders. (visual basic/ oracle products / SAP builders...) Second fight was among the programming language preferences that people adopted. (php/java/la la) Third fight was between the backen…
Because Javascript runs the web, which is huge.
We have a winner. There are so many JavaScript libraries and frameworks because there's so much JavaScript being written. It has nothing to do with anything about the language, apart from perhaps the thin standard library.
I generally see the whole "framework paralysis" as being fairly artificial and more just a convenient complaint to make. React/Angular/Vue have the enterprise space pretty well covered and you'd be more or less fine just picking one of those by throwing darts at a dartboard, unless you already have a preference for paradigm or style, in which case just pick the one that fits. These things are mature, after all. And the first two are backed by companies with huge vested interests in the frameworks being good, as they presumably dogfood them to hell and back.
Beyond that, I feel it matters much less what you use. But still, the general idea of just picking the one that best matches how you think about writing an app is still workable advice. It isn't like you have to look into every single framework ever, you just check out ten or so major ones.
This means that it's very easy to build a framework but also that it's very likely for a framework to break and under sustained, real life use cases.
This led to a cycle whereby javascript developers would get excited at the potential of a new framework, use it IRL and then get disillusioned before getting excited about another new framework.
I think this also drove the average age of javascript developers down (older developers were less patient with this pace of change) and this cycle sort of fed on itself too, as younger developers are more likely to jump on something new.
And, a large part of it is simply that javascript is an incredibly popular (possibly the most popular) language.
From what I understand this cycle has kind of come to a halt now and most people seem to default to react and the type system is getting a little less train-wreck-y with stuff like typescript.