I wouldn't choose Angular for a new project right now because it's in no man's land: 1.x is dead, 2.x is not available, and there's no path between the two.
That said, Angular gets the job done. It scales better than people think it does (it's inefficient but modern browsers are just so fast it rarely matters) and it's a lot more complete than React. Angular is a full MVC framework while React is just about the V.
I would say that lines of code is not a useful metric. From a developer standpoint, what I care about is how much "surface" a library adds, and in how many places. The React API is relatively small, easy to understand, and confined to a single place - rendering my views.
Completely agree with this. You can be really productive with Angular and as long as you avoid the most common pitfalls its more than fast enough, and comes with batteries included and a rich eco-system.
The crazy roadmap to 2.x, and the decisions around 2.x in general just makes it a no-go for new projects at this time.
That said, Angular gets the job done. It scales better than people think it does (it's inefficient but modern browsers are just so fast it rarely matters) and it's a lot more complete than React. Angular is a full MVC framework while React is just about the V.