For me as a developer angular feels like (I can be wrong since I am not some genius that works at Google) a tool for making hello World forms , like you want to give it to soem people that do not know JavaScript and have them write code using ng-if and ng-repeats, then on top of that you add a ton of magic that is implemented in a shit way so you most of the time you get n errors when soemthing is broken and if you are lucky you get some hints.

I used react a few years ago, this tool made sense, you create Components and you implement render functions(I even used it without JSX to understand it better), the nice stuff about react was that I could put breakpoints in the code and understand everything. I did not used React recently and I am reading that the develoeprs over-complicated it.

What was great with Flex4 ,WPF, Qt is that you had enough components in the base that you could write your application super fast, I would only create custom components in rare cases like when we needed to show some graphs and bar charts, and creating custom components just implied extending a base Widget and override the render/paint function.

Yeah, I am frustrated with Web frontend and angular, my latest issue was when i deleted some unused property of an object and a GUI just stopped working(blank) without any warning or error, I could not figure this issue in a few minutes so I passed it down to the angular expert (is still not fixed yet so I am not sure what caused it it and especially why no errors)

The appeal of AngularJS was more or less that, somewhat like Rails, it offered a One True Way that mostly worked pretty well. Overcomplicated by today's standards, sure, but remember that AngularJS was a decade ago, back when jQuery was still king and anything like architectural rigor on the frontend had yet to be imagined.

Especially with a team made up mostly of folks with less JS experience, you could better sustain velocity because you just needed one or two people who could build custom controls and otherwise handle complicated stuff, and most folks were perfectly able to build and ship features without nearly so much risk of spaghetti complications as you'd find with a less rigorous framework. That made it a good teaching and learning tool as well; you could start off a junior with a base of AngularJS-specific knowledge, and then generalize that into understanding JS proper and being able to work outside the structure AngularJS provided.

I wouldn't want to go back now, but I did and led a lot of good work with AngularJS, and used it to great effect as a mentoring tool besides. In the context of its time, it was brilliant.