What's "overwhelming" is the volatility of the ecosystem. "New" paradigms seem to appear all the time, people/compagnies publish new and attractive frameworks, other people/compagnies publish slightly different implementations of the same ideas, the "standards" always change, and everybody looks for ways to work _today_ with the technologies of _tomorrow_.

Basically, nothing they do is impossible to do with "good old PHP/MySQL/Javascript" but it certainly is a lot more exciting (and good for your resumé) that way.