[tallblondeguy]

I did a project or two in React, then worked with Angular 2+ for our in-house project.

I like React because it's easier to set up and get working; you don't need some ridiculous dev environment just to say "Hello world". I think React does one thing and does it really well, and its flexibility makes it easier to mix and match packages to do what you need to do.

Angular is ridiculously opinionated, and very complete. But for big projects or for multiple projects with different people coming in and out of the project this can be a strong asset. We've had some big React projects where you have to go out and get Redux, then start thinking about observables, maybe you want TypeScript but maybe you want Flow, etc. Angular already thought about all of that, made decisions for you, and structured it in a standard way so that once you learn the conventions it's pretty easy to reason about any Angular project.

And as a front-end dev who got started on the Web in the Netscape days, I appreciate that Angular doesn't treat CSS as a bug to be fixed. React (and the kinds of people who work on React) seem to desire a pure JavaScript world, while Angular keeps a more familiar HTML/CSS convention on the template level.