Like, first off, you're not really expected to keep up with every new development—I still haven't built a site with GraphQL even though it's past it's peak ubiquity. You just need to not be afraid of the possibility of learning something new.
I looked up GraphQL once for like 5 mins years ago to see what shape of thing it was, and now if I'm ever on a project that seems like it might benefit from it, that's when I do a 30 min look into what it actually provides and why I might use it, and most of that is just searching for those questions and seeing what other people have said.
Having said that, I've also still "kept up" with the latest in JS through two pretty low-effort habits:
- I read the headlines and articles on Hacker News while using uBlock Origin and the filter
news.ycombinator.com##.subtextto hide the comments and upvotes. This is hardly comprehensive and doesn't constitute a "healthy" view of silicon valley tech but it's broader than just JS and at least lets me know the major things tech bros care about. Again, I cannot emphasize how important it is to ignore the comments as they provide much more harm than benefit, and the site is considered a cesspool for a reason. - Newsletters! The real trick is that people are already doing the work for you and summarize stuff. My current newsletter for JS is https://bytes.dev/ which can be a bit blindly positive about new tech but hasn't, like, pivoted to being about LLMs or any shit like that.
