I know that feeling. To me as someone who is not fully immersed in the JavaScript world the problem was also that there are so many different parts working together. You are describing that in your article as well. It helped me a lot to really just focus on one part of the machinery at a time and completely understand what it's purpose is and how it works exactly before moving on to the next. For example, take 1-2 days to learn webpack, then do the same for JSX and so on. Things become a lot clearer quickly when you understand why each part exists and it will make a lot more sense why things are done in a certain way.

JavaScript frameworks are more like loose constructs that don't hide the interfaces between the different parts very well. This is not a good or a bad thing but it is very different from, for example, Rails which I found much easier to learn as a whole. You can accomplish a lot with Rails without even knowing about the different gems of which it is composed.