Ask HN: Help, I'm Drowning in JavaScript

I've had a rough day yesterday. I'm a web dev, but read that as in "I learnt HTML in the 90s and worked on small projects maintaining websites". Hence the username. On my current job I'm working with a proprietary software, which uses VanillaJS to modify XML/JSON files to make the data useable for our company. I'm not the dumbest person on the planet, or so I believe, I understand what coding is, I understand the fundamentals. Yesterday I spent 4 hours regexing out HTML data from not so well maintained data sources and screamed at my computer, because I was not able to find patterns. I know, please don't ask. This is not high level programming. We're talking .replace and .match, with the occaisonal if/else over hundreds of sets. My colleague calmed me down and took the time to help me. Bless him. This colleague has multiple projects within the company, because, to me, he is a modern web dev: Building scrapers from scratch with Node, use