[_akhe]

React is still the best IMO. It's crazy how much you cover with setState and useEffect alone, I barely use the other hooks. Combined with adjacent tooling and paradigms like JSX, React Native, Next.js, I find the others can't quite keep up with the React ecosystem.

I had to use new Angular on a project recently, it's come a long way and it's actually not too bad especially with GPT-4 explaining the reasoning behind Angular, etc. However, it's no React! It's still just too complex, and I can't be bothered to get into decorators, and other quirks that come along with the Angular world.

If you're liking vanilla JS right now, you might like Node - do some backend stuff. It's just regular JavaScript. I think it's always good to stay brushed up on vanilla JS, I do one-off FE stuff all the time in classic HTML/CSS/JS, but for websites my go-to is definitely still React (Next.js typically). I prefer the declarative style, think it works well for FE state, you end up needing some kind of state management usually.

[yen223]

I genuinely can't think of anything Angular does that I felt was strictly better than what React does.

The closest is probably that Angular is batteries-included, whereas React is just a view library. This argument I would be more sympathetic with if those batteries did not include observables for (almost) everything.

(I know about Signals. Not a fan of that either)

[SvenL]

The strange is, how long will it be just a view library. I‘m a beginner and was frustrated that the official react documentation advises to use next.js or some other react framework instead of vanilla react (because react is just a view library and you need routing, state management and other stuff anyway)

First thing which came to my mind was „huh, angular was right“.

And yes, vite and vanilla react is still possible…

[yen223]

The main thing that next.js gives over React is a backend, something that Angular by itself doesn't give you.

[orra]

Observables are painful, especially when they should just be available Promises.

But Signals? That's just what everybody is converging on, hence making Angular no worse and no better than the competition in that regard.