"We switched from X to Y and we are never going back."
I think I've seen thousands of combinations for X and Y on HN. First everyone switched from JS to JQuery, Then JQuery to Ember or Backbone and never looked back. At one point everyone moved from Ember to Angular and never looked back. Then from Angular to React. Some people even switched from Swift and Java to React Native and never looked back. Then from Flux to Redux. And now I see people switching from React to Vue.js (and even back to JQuery?). And these were just for the Frontend JS libraries. It's all like a cat and mouse game. You cannot win. And I'm not sure there is even real progress. It seems like they are all reinventing the wheel again and again.
The people who are busy productively shipping products are not the ones who spend the most time and attention on these online debates, so it's easy to form a biased impression.
It's the developer version of the 24 hour news cycle. The many companies who are steadily and happily shipping valuable products on one stack aren't the ones that generate drama and pageviews.
Taking just one of your examples: the Ember ecosystem is large and growing, with many billion dollar businesses standardizing their apps on Ember. But that is too boring compared to "why we switched" posts.
"Everyone" turns out to be way bigger than "people you are likely to hear from on HN".
Well, since React and Vue 2.0 are so similar it's not a big deal to switch. And yes, I'm not going back to React after experiencing the cohesive and well-thought out Vue. If something super better comes along I might start using that, but I doubt that'll be anytime soon. The improvement needs to be worth The effort to learn the new framework. With React -> Vue the improvement doesn't need to be enormous because it's an easy conversion.
No, I am not going back, in fact I never went back.
I switched from Jquery to Angular 1, never went back.
I switched from Angular 1 to React, never went back.
I switched from React to Angular 2, never went back.
I am considering Vue.js, and yes, I will never go back.
My favorite HN trope is the blog post (bonus points for Medium post) about how a startup or company switched their poorly maintained, bloated X application to a well thought-out rewrite in Y and how Y solved all their issues and it's the best thing ever.
I think I've seen thousands of combinations for X and Y on HN. First everyone switched from JS to JQuery, Then JQuery to Ember or Backbone and never looked back. At one point everyone moved from Ember to Angular and never looked back. Then from Angular to React. Some people even switched from Swift and Java to React Native and never looked back. Then from Flux to Redux. And now I see people switching from React to Vue.js (and even back to JQuery?). And these were just for the Frontend JS libraries. It's all like a cat and mouse game. You cannot win. And I'm not sure there is even real progress. It seems like they are all reinventing the wheel again and again.
This also reminds me of Joel's article on "cover fire": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html