I agree, but anyway as mentioned, it's about tooling. When I compare creating JS SPA vs. for example .NET MVC website, with JS you will get awesome SPA (oh wait, do you really need that?) - easier way to create dynamic stuff but with cost of bigger complexity which probably comes in ways as project management, DevOps, testing.
I was developing some SPAs in Angular, React and of course there are some great things but I do not see the pure reason because of additional complexity to develop everything in this "modern" way.
Spending so much time on meetings, especially awesome agile scrum - standups and even when working in probably 5th company, business processes do not work well, people deal with same problems of work organization. For me as developer, this kills my productivity and annoys me sometimes when it's just to much in a week.
I remember content from friends, then no related content when Facebook was testing feed changes and now, it's mostly based on meme pictures and group posts. I forgot that there are any "friends".
As you said, you feel overwhelmend. For example,I usually code my side-project in the evening, after 8 hrs of coding at my job.
I have a goal to create working application. Is it a joy for me or just another work that takes my time and gives me nothing? Sometimes, I don't know. I keep working with different technologies, tools so it's not the same as at the job. When i feel, that's not a joy, I am tired or whatever, i don't force myself to do that.
Rather than "learning" programming language, you can write down an idea for the sample app and start working on that. Rather than reading a book, you can watch a video or you can go read outside.
Create schedule, couple hours per week, break your loop.