> I'm just shocked at how resistant people are to new technologies and ideas that could make things so much easier
> I see how so many things we take as standard in the industry are incredibly slow, overcomplicated and inefficient, but when I try to introduce new ideas or patterns at work they're unfamiliar and therefore "too complex"
Almost everywhere I've worked there is always resistance to change - but not always because people are too lazy to learn new things. There's an inherent cost for a team to adopt something new - there's no free lunch. Especially when it comes to new technologies, if your team doesn't have the chops to dig into the source when things go wrong, you're probably not
going to have a good time even if they do adopt it. And new technologies can be incredibly complex - can your team manage the complexity? Who will support and own the builds, the deployment process, troubleshooting, etc? People who cry at the first sign of trouble will continue to do so.
You have to justify it to the team, the manager, or the business. Oftentimes if you ask for permission to add something new, you'll probably never get it. If you go ahead and prove empirically to everyone that it works, and it works better than the old stuff, that's a great way to start adoption.
Of course, if you still can't get adoption without legitimate reasons for pushback, I'd say the team culture is the real problem. People on the team think learning new things is more work, and why work more for no pay increase - especially for a job they don't really care that much about anyway?
If you work on one of these teams, you might as well just power through objections and just do whatever you want. What do you have to lose? Even if you get fired, big whoop - you weren't gonna last long there anyway. Of course, this is all predicated on the fact that you are competent and not just automatically dismissing real concerns of teammates - if you go full cowboy and actually break everything, you deserve the consequences.
I've worked at awful places like that too, but I've been able to find the top 5% of competent folks and work with them to make life more tolerable. It's hard to find a place with curious folks that dig super deep into stuff. You have to really grill the interviewers or ask to see their codebase, or know someone who already works there. I only interview with places where previous coworkers I trust already work on the team now to avoid this problem.