It's not that it's improving, it's that it's changing in every direction at light speed, and if you say went on holiday for a month offline when you come back the odds that you find the syntax and the ecosystem substantially different is very high. And whether all or most of these changes are indeed improving anything is doubtful. I personally can't follow JS anymore, it's a storm of not-so-news from every direction.
Since ES6/2015 the changes have been pretty minimal, so I disagree with your assertion. Since 2015 I find that async functions is probably the most alien addition... and the handful of others that are significant are mostly ignored or very natural extensions.
The shift from callbacks to promises is kind of alien, but frankly that was started well before 2015 even. The .babelrc I use for node projects is pretty simple as well, here's one I use for an AWS Lambda build...
So that's literally 3 things that aren't in spec yet, and a couple that work around the runtime not having them. Most of what's going in is already in, or relatively well established and on the way.
Now, you do have to include a lot more if you want IE11 support, but hey, that's a different thing. I'm not sure what exactly you're having a trouble wrapping your head around.
