It gets a lot of hate on HN when compared to React/Vue/etc, but I used it for years and it was a breathe of fresh air coming from raw JS. I think a lot of people on HN form opinions on software and its landscape without actually using it or interacting with its community (outside of HN).
According to on of the biggest frontend developer surveys, The State of JavaScript 2018 [1], Angular is the leading framework that people don't want to use again after having tried it.
So it's not merely HN criticism, this is a very common theme and having used all popular big name fronted frameworks myself extensively, I can also see why many people feel that way. Not gonna steer the discussion there, though, just came here to point out that it's not a niche opinion.
While this is a very personal opinion, the main problems that I have with Angular are only increased with newer versions. I used to really like Angular 1.x, from there on, the required amount of scaffolding etc has only increased.
I'm sure you can however find someone who feels just the opposite way.
All in all I don't think this affects the results too much though. For example Vue is also in one big bucket with 1.x still being a thing. Angular isn't the only one who's had a fair share of changes over time.
I see Vue as ,,Angular, the good parts.''
It's not that Angular is that bad, it's more that it was over-engineered (just like TensorFlow compared to pyTorch), but it was the best framework when it came out.
It's so weird to me that AngularJS (1.x) is a polarizing as Electron.
It has it's warts, but I still love it as it's productivity factor is off the charts. Tried getting into Vue but do not want to deal with the complexity of learning a build tool. Could not get routing to work in Vue with static files.
I think most people (including me) didn't like the 1.4 to 2.0 "transition" (e.g. not a single ounce of backward compatibility, basically Angular 1.4 was abandoned)