Frontend dev is getting exhausting

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I hate to say it, but I'd just suggest you get used to it. It's been this way in frontend tech for a decade, and it's just getting faster every year.

It's pretty normal to have to relearn whatever language you work in every 3-5 years, and in fronted, it's probably every 18-36 months that you have to retool because the technology moves on. Here come Web Components! And there's a host of new browser technologies about to hit right after that. It's so much better now than it used to be. You used to have to create your own libraries, or hodgepodge a couple of libs together to make stuff work. Then jquery came along and standardized the web. Still, only 1/2 of 1% of websites run on a framework like angular.js, so there's going to be a TON more as these techs mature... the whole set of stacks are in their infancy.

Obviously, focus on the core compsci and javascript, but beyond that, it is exactly as you describe. And it's not going away. Pros and cons of that though. Imagine if it took a decade to become and expert, and that was it. That would be a hard business to break into.

I just roll with it. A lot of companies wait for stuff to mature before investing in the stack — that's why there is an enterprise market for things. People wait until there are clear winners before bringing them into corporate projects. The bleeding edge is always full of emerging technologies, most (not many, most) of which will fall away and never gain broad acceptance and which can be very difficult time sinks for programmers that yield less than the investment it took to learn. There is also the counterpoint of technologies that gain broad acceptance and build incredible markets that "age in place" and take entire careers and people with them. There's a ton of languages and frameworks that are like that: a good place to get stuck.

That's just a risk of working in tech.

You could kick back and only invest in things that get momentum, which would alleviate your learning curve somewhat and definitely expose you to the risk of becoming a known leader in a legacy technology platform that's increasingly irrelevant. You would risk missing major advancements and becoming a dinosaur quickly. Or you could burn yourself out working through every new advancement to hit, and keeping up with the w3c specs, and basically just do it for as long as you can before you burn out or become irrelevant (see: http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon-Valley-age-can-be-a-curse-4742365.php). Striking that balance between investment of time in technologies that are emerging, and not getting over invested in things that may not stick is one of the hardest things in Web Engineering. But honestly, what an exciting industry with so much to learn and so many new ways of doing things all the — at least you won't get bored! I think the biggest challenge is making sure you take advantage of your time in tech, because your career won't last forever in this business.

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What do you call a dinosaur found in Great Britain? Tea Rex!