>they buried a relatively simple and elegant messaging system in tons and tons of incoherent, unmaintained, inextensible and incompatible (with websockets at the time) stuff.

If all it was was a chat app then angular was over kill.

Leveraging frameworks on projects for which they're unnecessary doesn't show that the frameworks are bad, just that the devs are bad.

The reality was probably that those "web-boys" have to maintain dozens of applications and so follow a certain workflow for all of those applications.

Many frameworks allow for easy and streamlined testing, are more reliable across browsers, allow for easy extensibility, and help you easily track data.

In the real world, people can't be expected to maintain dozens of custom tool chains and there aren't a ton of job postings for people who don't know ANY web frameworks/libraries.