It’s true that you can easily fall into analysis paralysis when you start learning JS, but honestly things have somewhat stabilized in recent years. 10 years ago everybody was switching frameworks every 6 months, but these days we’re going on 8+ years of absolute React dominance. So I guess that’s it for the view layer.
The data layer has seen some movement in more recent years with Flux then GraphQL / Relay, but I think most people have settled on either Apollo or react-query now (depending on your backend).
On the backend there was basically only express.js, and I think it’s still the king if you only want to write a backend.
Static websites came back in fashion with Jekyll and Github Pages so Gatsby solved that problem in js-land for a while, but nowadays Next also fulfills that niche, along with the more fullstack-oriented apps.
Svelte, Vue, Aurelia and Mithril are mostly niche frameworks. They have a dedicated, vocal fanbase (see the Svelte guy as sibling to your comment) but most of the industry has settled along the lines I’ve mentioned.
I’ve read all of them, and I really enjoyed them. It’s true that it’s basically “Royal Navy in space”, and it might be a little cheezy, but it’s a pretty relaxing read.
The space combat stuff gets much better in the later books, Weber managed to build satisfying mechanics for it. There’s some good political intrigue too. The one thing that pulled me “out” of the books a couple times were some character names, some of them are pretty ridiculous (Queen Elizabeth III for example).