This was the deal breaker for me when first looking at Angular - loose coupling, progressive enhancement, accessibility and keeping code in its appropriate layers seemed to get thrown out for an attitude that everyone has JS running... it felt like a return to the days of Flash.

I could ramble for a long time about it, anecdotally; I have peers who use (and seem to enjoy using) Angular (all .net devs), and others who point out its flaws (front-end architects). I find it a very interesting discussion point.

The fact that I can declare a scope variable in a directive and it is magically available in a controller is also another one, only once one starts to dig do they find out about the less than obvious scope controls to not allow what amounts to global variables. Further down that path, variables can be declared in the template, in the controller or in a directive. There is no traceability of where state starts. Honestly I am the type that blames myself first and think I must be missing something, but there are just such junior mistakes in how Angular was implemented, that it does encourage voodoo.

You can use data-attributes and write perfectly valid HTML.