GWT has been continually approved upon. Compilation is super fast now, and developing is a breeze with super dev mode. You can even debug your Java (precompiled) code within chrome. as a GWT user, I don't have to worry about all those things that trouble Javascript developers. Refactoring is easy as it is just Java.
It has changed a ton. there is now super dev mode (I don't know when you last used it), so it no longer requires that java applet plugin. Also after the first compile, you only need to recompile changes. I agree with others after going to Angular, etc, I continually scratch my head on why GWT is not universally used more.