Developers in these environments usually do not take part in these surveys.
Angular team member here. These are our observations as well. Based on metrics we collect (opt in telemetry, website traffic, language service downloads, etc), there are over 1.7m developers using Angular.
I'd say that many of them are in the enterprise, but there are also a lot of startups that bet on Angular. This is mostly due to the integrated stack where folks need to make fewer decisions and get smooth updates across versions.
Stability is another factor. We validate every commit pushed to the Angular repo with 2600+ projects inside of Google. If any of their tests break we rollout automated migrations or rethink the implementation.
All the mainstream frameworks are great tools. I'd say if you're looking at React, Vue or Angular and think "Dunno why anyone would use that, must just be the "we've always used x here"" than I'd say rethink your approach to "it's probably a good tool for their use case".
I have never witnessed an evaluation or discussion of tools for a project. Ever. Neither open-ended nor otherwise. I’ve worked on diverse projects for various clients (since Angular 2 arrived) and Angular was either an explicit requirement by the client or a team decision. There were no arguments, ever.
The people I worked with were never particularly knowledgeable. In fact, for non-trivial use cases, I feel that Angular is actually hostile to young professionals. RxJS in particular is a topic I’ve seen people struggle with a lot.
Can you achieve success with Angular? Absolutely. I don’t feel it’s any easier than with React or even AngularJS though. (No experience with Vue.)
I am not sure about that, it is more that the full stack of technologies for current SPA is daunting for new developers.
When learning react one just go to one part at a time, first rendering, then props, now learn to use the router library. When using angular one can feel overwhelmed because all the panel of tools is presented in one repo.
Anecdotal: when Angular (1.0) first came out, it felt professional and mature; you could clearly define your components and write a complete unit test on top of that. It fits well in an enterprise environment where developers are taught to do the same with (usually) Java classes.
I've consulted for a company once where they wanted to rewrite their UI in web technology; we did a POC for React, Angular, Vue and Ember. In the end, they went with Angular because they felt the most comfortable with it.
You could be right, I can see how arguing with component instances etc. can be easier when you come from object-oriented GUI platforms.