Personally I prefer to wait until technology is battle tested before adopting. New technologies are for side projects imo. If I had to categorize myself I would say early-late majority on this graph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations#/medi...)

Things we consider industry standard though, why should you need to fight for it? An example I can think of, dependency injection. Ideally you can test your software better and realease more reliable builds. Believe it or not I do come across companies that still are not aware of these concepts. Introducing it would be possible without breaking anything because you can continue instantiating services the old fashioned way.

With newish stuff that's still changing, if it won't impact production (i.e., tooling) I'm up for adopting it earlier than usual.

One example I can think of is javascript bundling and packaging. This would not impact production, but will have a pretty big impact on feature integration between team members and rate of completion. In MVC you need to hand type up the path of all your JS files and stick them into bundles. Not bad, not great either. Instead you could take your flavor of package management and have that bundle and minify your js files for you automatically.

I've been around government contracting and when you see problems that come up a lot, that we have industry standard solutions too, it's hard not to feel frustrated. I get where you're coming from though, just sharing my experience :)

It took me years to realize the reason programmers do this is because the tools that "seem cool" make their lives easier at the expense of everything else. This is where the popular traits of "laziness and hubris" become a liability instead of an asset.

More programmers need to embrace the suck.

In my case, usually something is broken or breaking in production frequently enough to warrent some changes. Plus, there are other reasons you can make a change even though it's not broken.

Sometimes it can make you more productive. Or though your site is still responding to current customer demands in a timely fashion, you know that the mobile experience could be significantly improved now that browsing via cell phone is on the rise.

Another thing to consider is employability both from a company and individual perspective. If you can keep up with moderately current (not the latest and greatest) trends, you'll attract people who want to grow in their careers. I wouldn't want to work on C# 2.0 using Visual Source Safe. It's hard to convince a company that you can learn git on the job.

In general I like to move without introducing breaking changes. I'm not a cowboy coder, it's really exhausting working with one. I do think there's merit in realizing when it's time to change though.