[Bahamut]

Coming from the Angular community & still connected quite a bit to it despite currently working primarily with React, I don’t think having an incremental change would have helped Angular compared to React due to the complexity of Angular.js’s API & its flaws. I actually stand by quite strongly behind the decision to rewrite in Angular 2, but Angular 2 took a long time to come into being - it was rewritten 3+ times in getting to its current state & 3-4 years in the making. I think Google devoted the proper resources too late into it in its quest to make the most performant & flexible framework. I believe this gap is what largely hurt Angular, and while the PR snafu was visible, I think the current situation would have been arrived at regardless.

[esistgut]

I agree with you and I think Google is still underestimating the amount of required resources because the framework is still not really "done", a couple examples: universal (SSR) just hit a stable release on angular-cli so it needs time to be widespread and supported in the ecosystem. The are core components like the i18n waiting for a major refactor because they lack basic features: https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/11405