In this paper, I review our current understanding of the applicability of hydrodynamics to modeling the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), focusing on the question of hydrodynamization/thermalization of the QGP and the anisotropic hydrodynamics (aHydro) far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic framework. I discuss the existence of far-from-equilibrium hydrodynamic attractors and methods for determining attractors within different hydrodynamical frameworks. I also discuss the determination of attractors from exact solutions to the Boltzmann equation in relaxation time approximation and effective kinetic field theory applied to quantum chromodynamics. I then present comparisons of the kinetic attractors with the attractors obtained in standard second-viscous hydrodynamics frameworks and aHydro. I demonstrate that, due to the resummation of terms to all orders in the inverse Reynolds number, the aHydro framework can describe both the weak- and strong-interaction limits. I then review the phenomenological application of aHydro to relativistic heavy-ion collisions using both quasiparticle aHydro and second-order viscous aHydro. The phenomenological results indicate that aHydro provides a controlled extension of dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics to the early-time far-from-equilibrium stage of heavy-ion collisions. This allows one to better describe the data and to extract the temperature dependence of transport coefficients at much higher temperatures than linearized second-order viscous hydrodynamics.