But what do I do with my 25 years of experience in Perl?

On the contrary, understanding the prototype nature of JavaScript has improved my understanding of OOP very much like gaining perspective when you learn something new, reflect on something you already knew and you run into a different point of view about the latter.

Don't do it dude! Don't go against main trends! An application built on custom made tools will give you nightmares and turn your workplace into a unstable one, as opposed to those that are perfectly proven to work by the whole freaking community . Why are you considering not using Babel? Any restrictions or is it just a matter of not having used it yet? EDIT: Semantics.

S*hit a*s library? That's a bit harsh... We have evolved from jQuery sure, but it saved all of our s*hit a*ses for a long while there, champ. We should all kiss John Resig's s*it a*s at least once if you ask me.

I'm inclined to say that React and Vue are the new pair of frameworks that will be coexisting at the "top", if there is such a thing. I don't see why anyone would choose Angular over React today: A super opinionated tool versus a community-raised one? Come on... Additionally, Vue is clearly the guy who does everything you need but in a less robust and more performant way as React. The latter has a full ecosystem working, though.

Turning off phone notifications. Configuring my mail account to mark as read emails from different notification systems I don't need.

As most of the time, each tool for each job... Structure a production application at corporate level with SQL and store any document-like resource with NoSQL. Relationship are complex, don't break up! Hehe!