Granted- I've only been actively developing for about 18-20 years (not being facetious, I was about 14 and wouldn't have been privy to or really involved enough to perceive the thrashing or lack there of with Java 1.0 or Python 1.0, etc) but I don't think they ever really thrashed like what we're seeing with JS, I don't think they could have.

You didn't have broadband, you couldn't really share entire libraries of code freely, and package managers were not around at the very beginning. In 1995/96 you certainly had message boards and forums, but there wasn't a StackOverflow/whatever like community that made it easy to find an answer to your problem AND/OR a lib to help solve it.

You needed to know how to write a linked list, because you had to write your own. Well maybe not, but you had to write a lot of your own things that just don't need to be written today. God I remember my StringUtils jar from when I was a teenager. That damn thing followed me through college, and I gave the source to friends who then iterated on it (or not). But I didn't have a GitHub to post it to and an NPM to announce, and make it available to anyone looking for a new StringUtils library. It was just mine, free to anyone who asked, but no one knew to ask.

Now your ideas and code and spread to millions of people instantly AND they can find it, which is letting people start from an idea and iterate on it rapidly. Everybody is announcing their StringUtil as the next best thing since taking vowels out of words became cool.

So, I guess yeah- we did thrash 20 years ago, but we thrashed silently and alone.