It was early in the 2010s that I saw all the web design shops who made Ruby on Rails sites in my small town suddenly start building all their apps in Angular and struggling.
I'd ask them why they were doing this and it wasn't masochism, rather they believed that small town web clients demanded SPAs and that they couldn't sell user-friendly RoR apps that were affordable to develop.
Web apps/spa/pwa can be a great value choice if you need to hit a lot of platforms on a budget.
Angular definitely started out as kind of a dog. Some modern frameworks I'd put up there with ruby, maybe better. Don't chase the hype. Lots of great tooling out there. Prove something out before you run with it. It's not THAT hard.
And that was already a while after Outlook Web access, and even later than people using hidden iframes to simulate XHR before XHR existed. They might not have been common, but they're old by now.