>tl;dr: We are no longer recommending the AJAX crawling proposal we made back in 2009.
Google is now saying they will probably be able to just index your Angular app without any extra effort on your side.
It is, and has been, a far cry from actual optimization: Giving your content the best possible ranking it deserves.
Want to be able to rank for an exact sentence match? Sure, use Angular. Want to actually compete for rankings? Do not build a single-page Angular application.
Solid SEO is about optimizing for users, thinking: "would I do this if search engines did not exist?". SEO for Angular apps has become: "Detect and redirect one of the major search engines to a text alternative".
It seems like the days of
>"Detect and redirect one of the major search engines to a text alternative"
are over