[zdragnar]

I dont know how much has changed in the two years since I last touched it, but Angular's blessed packages and ecosystem were more of a time sink than anything else- the flex layout package in particular was substantially buggier than simply using postcss with what was at the time css-next (I think it is preset-env now?)

Additionally, baking in rx-js felt like a serious mistake- not only was there the roller coaster ramp up of learning angular, but helping others on the team learn rx-js on top of it while trying to be productive probably cut our output in half.

It didnt help that we had a mix of junior developers and experienced .net devs all learning at the same time- half the battle was explaining which feature came from ES2015, typescript, angular or rx-js.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but I am reasonably confident that we could have been significantly better off with react. Ember was never an option because they are only just now getting features react and angular developers have been taking for granted for years.

[ridicter]

I never used the flex layout package. That's a third party library, and I think sticking with CSS grid + flex makes more sense. (Alternatively, you can just use bootstrap or tailwind or whatever.)

RxJS is actually one of my favorite parts to Angular, but it _does_ lengthen the learning curve quite a bit. Once you get past that, you can have amazingly reactive apps. One of my beefs with ReactJS is that it doesn't play as well with RxJS. Now that I think of it, you're not actually required to use RxJS with Angular: you can convert observables to promises (`toPromise()`).

I could see how having junior/new developers could make things a lot harder. I remember first learning typescript and having to keep the TS playground open at all times to see how it compiled to ES5.

[mattlondon]

Yeah when I first started learning Angular I had similar thoughts "Why did they make this so hard?!?!?!" regarding RxJS. To be fair regarding Typescript & ES2015, you'd get that with React too (since in my mind you;d be insane to start something new in raw Javascript these days when Typescript has made our lives so much so much so much better).

Now though I find RxJS to be a really elegant mental model for dealing with asynchronous stuff. I wish there was more Reactive/Rx* stuff around in the things I work with. Its really nice.

[vips7L]

I've had the opposite experience regarding RxJava. I really think "reactive" is an anti-pattern. Its made my companies code base much harder to reason about.