The fun part is that Angular (1, anyway) has pretend-separation. Sure, there's truth in DOM, but not really. Littering your custom directives all over the place may feel like progressive enhancement but if you're using an app framework like Angular your JS is likely already complex enough that you can't meaningfully consider it a mere "enhancement" -- we're talking core functionality, not fairy dust.

People react (heh) strongly to React's JSX when they first come across it but at the end of the day I find React far more honest in its approach. Your Angular templates don't really gain anything from looking like they're just HTML templates -- instead you end up either serializing your data into some kind of string format or faffing about with magical nested "scope" objects (as if JS scoping wasn't enough to keep in your head).

But in order to maintain that illusion you also have to buy into these huge layers of added complexity when writing your own directives. I'd rather go all the way back to steamrolling the DOM with Backbone templates than these pretend-semantical lumps of custom elements and attributes.

Sorry for ranting. I'm still sore about being burned by Angular.