[steve_adams_86]

People who love Angular really love it, so I trust that there's a legitimate place for it. I think one of the main things people love is that the convention and tooling eliminates a ton of the noise and redundancy that the other tools tend to lead to as teams slap applications together without sufficient guard rails.

Essentially a lot of the tools we use are only meant to be view layers, and we constantly cobble together supporting layers (models and controllers for example) ad-hoc. Angular handles that off the shelf. I suspect a lot of people are put off by this because it feels imposing and they might not realize they're implementing the same stuff manually, and likely doing it worse.

I used to think it's plain old garbage but realized that's ridiculous. There are reasons people prefer it in some scenarios.

SolidJS is my favourite by a long shot, but I find myself using React because I know so many people I write for and work with are more comfortable with it. I'd be glad to use it more often if it made sense.

[dottjt]

I'm currently learning Angular and it's an absolute dumpster fire of a framework in the sense that it offers no clear philosophy. It's just a jumbled mess of concepts and syntax.

I think where it shines though is that it's completely batteries included, which I can see being useful for large enterprises where it's near impossible to change things.

Having recently worked on a very legacy React app, it became apparent to me the value of frameworks like Angular. If you can maintain it and upgrade it gradually, React is arguably the better choice. But if you're leaving it to stagnate, Angular is a far better proposition.

[steve_adams_86]

I think we're on the same page here. I've also found that a non-trivial number of teams actively maintaining React apps are still totally capable of rendering them into a state of dysfunction and paralysis in the same way that stagnating apps can devolve.

They think they don't need batteries included because it's 'bloat' or the opinionated patterns are inferior, but after a couple years they've got a couple dozen seriously bad patterns and a 400kb application that could easily be pared down to 100 or so.

This isn't so much a virtue of Angular or React specifically, but a reality of the deficiencies in our industry when it comes to the human side of the equation. These people would be better off following Angular's general conventions whether they realize it or not.

[WorldMaker]

So much of Angular versus React is "No one got fired for picking Google tech" versus "No one got fired for picking Meta tech" with some of the obvious problems of their "parent" organizations' approaches visible in the maintenance efforts.