It’s not “them”, though. It’s me! :D

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.)