Software development is fad driven, I think a lot or most people would agree with this. I myself find this to be lamentable. But over the years I've asked myself, why is this the case? I mean it has been faddish for years, this isn't new in the current era.
I think there are two main drivers for fad-ism in software. One is we as developers, are required to chase the popular languages and frameworks to stay current, marketable, and employable. So there is always a sense of "what do I have to learn next, so I can switch jobs succesfully when I need to". Another driver is, developers seek to gain experience by re-doing things from the past. Example, creating new languages, or compiler for an existing language, provides inexperience developers with fantastic new experiences and knowledge. This is desirable.
So yeah, we got fads, and us old timers, or not so old timers with a historical perspective, watch our lawns, but everyone has to learn somehow. Ideally a lot of this would come from an apprenticeship/journeyman system, or a University degree of some sort. But for now it's all we have.
To me, software development seems as tribal as politics. People tend to like and agree with those in their own tribe, and tend to see criticism of their tribe's preferred ideology as an attack on their identity.
There's a lot of pressure to be part of a popular tribe, and so you see situations where even a mild criticism of, for example, the a piece of the JavaScript tribe's technology (like, say, npm or Webpack) tends to elicit vitriolic responses and counter arguments.
You can sometimes get away with this kind of criticism if you choose your words carefully and make it very clear (or at least pretend to) that you're actually a member of the tribe you're criticizing, and that your criticism is meant to be constructive. So you say something like 'I use npm, and I like it, but here's where I struggle with it and here's how I'd improve it'. But if you just write about why you dislike it, you're likely to be flamed and criticized, even if everything you wrote verifiably correct.
So I find that watching programmers argue in blogs and on HN and Reddit feels a lot like reading political arguments on Reddit, or Facebook. And maybe that's why programming tends to be faddish. Each tribe is mostly only aware of its own history; there's no real shared sense of culture, or much awareness of the rich shared history that got us to where we are today. And so you see lots of wheel reinvention, as people poorly re-solve problems that were already solved long ago by other programming tribes.
These are just my personal observations, though. I could very well be completely wrong. :)
I think there are two main drivers for fad-ism in software. One is we as developers, are required to chase the popular languages and frameworks to stay current, marketable, and employable. So there is always a sense of "what do I have to learn next, so I can switch jobs succesfully when I need to". Another driver is, developers seek to gain experience by re-doing things from the past. Example, creating new languages, or compiler for an existing language, provides inexperience developers with fantastic new experiences and knowledge. This is desirable.
So yeah, we got fads, and us old timers, or not so old timers with a historical perspective, watch our lawns, but everyone has to learn somehow. Ideally a lot of this would come from an apprenticeship/journeyman system, or a University degree of some sort. But for now it's all we have.