I agree with this. If you're augmenting a traditional request/html-response web app with some JavaScript functionality, a lighter weight view library fits the bill nicely. But, if you're developing a SPA that consumes an API, you might really enjoy what a more holistic framework provides in terms of code structure, front-end data management, and just general guidance on how to do certain standard things, like basic CRUD.
The key is the single directional data flow. It was purposed in Flux, made better in Redux, and is used in Angular as well.
If you're writing a large web app, the dependency injection part of Angular 2+ isolates your modules much better than Redux. You won't need a single file with action creators. Each service can contain its own information.
Though not a feature of Angular, Observables are the baked in method of HTTP. Using Observables are far superior to Promises. You can compose Observables and make the callback part of javascript a lot easier on you. You can also cancel Observables, which is not possible with promises.
One of the things I miss with React is JSX, however, it's not so bad. There is even a mobile framework called nativescript that allows you to write Angular 2+ code with Native UI.
People jumping on the Angular hate train are mostly riding the vapor from Angular 1.X. The new framework has been done very well.
The biggest problems with Angular2+ is that they called it Angular, and had a terrible release.
It's not Angular, it's a completely different framework. They rode their own hype train and it's made searching for tutorials, examples, libraries much more difficult.
I was lucky in that we didn't start our project until after the true release happened, but having such a long alpha, beta, and release candidate stage really hurt momentum. Articles and tutorials written before June 16' can be completely useless with the amount of breaking changes.
With that all said I'm really liking Angular 2+ with ngrx (redux). The problems only really appear when I'm trying to bring in other libraries as they haven't been written well.
This is my single biggest problem with Angular 2. It's not Angular, but in calling it "Angular 2," they effectively killed off a powerful framework which had a promising future, all while basically hamstringing Angular 2 from the start for (at least) the reasons you mentioned.
Do you mean lighterweight as jQuery or VueJS/React?
I ask because I'm having a major FUD of using VueJS in a small (tiny) project - I don't seem to be able to think in those terms yet, and I don't really use npm (those starter projects generate 1000 files...).
I'm from the time when you would just list JS files in the HTML..
