The mental model for React is much simpler than Angular's.

In React, There are two concepts one needs to understand: Components, and Hooks. JSX too, but as a web dev the HTML-like syntax was already familiar.

In Angular, you need to understand: the binding syntax; Components; Templates; Factories; Modules and Services. And learning bindings also means learning RxJS (which I love as a standalone lib, but is a big cognitive load when coupled with the rest of ng).

Even just comparing the "Fundamentals" page of Angular versus the "Main Concepts" of React (which, isn't exactly the best measure of complexity, of course, but it's A measure), you can see Angular spends 8 of its 10 sub-sections explaining essentially-required concepts, while in React it uses 6 out of 12 sub-sections.

React is much more concise in terms of concepts, and instead just has a bunch of common patterns that are sufficiently approachable and memorable, but most importantly can be "rediscovered"/"derived" on your own, rather than relying on framework-provided "black box" concepts.

Now, if angular would prove substantially better in terms of performance or maintainability or so, that might've been ok. But they're not. Performance is on par, I find refactorings actually harder because of the heaps of boilerplate angular requires, etc. They invented way too complex solutions to solve problems that either don't exist, or other frameworks solved better.

Not saying one is better than other but in my opinion, entry barrier for React is lower than Angular which may be an important factor for React's popularity.

There’s no good or bad. As in any architectural adoption, it should’ve based on your team’s capabilities and support capabilities.

Experience matters too. There are good reasons to use either platform.

Enterprise Java and .NET shops usually reach out for Angular first.

And I have no intentions to ever advise React with its FP approach with a myriad of endless libraries, to devs that just want to get stuff done.

The learning curve is steep I agree. There does feel like there is a lot of ceremony and boilerplate required for even the more basic "hello world". Also if you are not familiar with RxJS before learning Angular then that is a second learning curve that you need to know too and it is a challenge.

The docs are also very frustrating:

- the API reference is usually just auto-generated with perhaps a single sentence saying "The FooBarDooDad does foo to bar" with zero other content, e.g. https://angular.io/api/core/Query

- the tutorial guides are absolutely huge epic documents, scrolling screen after screen after screen after screen and are far too long and far too convoluted to be useful in my opinion. It feels like they are several entire chapters lifted from a printed book or something, rather than something useful for a developer trying to implement something. E.g. https://angular.io/tutorial/toh-pt6 (and that is just part 6!) I've been doing this for years and I still hate having to go back to those docs.

- the tutorials are all talking about some "Heros" app that I have no idea what it is or what it is doing. I wish they just had examples for the simplest-possible case in stackblitz-widgets that does not need me to know the ins-and-outs of their sample app.

That said, once you are up and running with Angular I have found it is very easy to use, and RxJS is really nice once you get your head around it. Everything works largely as expected, and you can more or less forget about Angular and concentrate on the logic. As far as boilerplate goes, I have found that once you have done the boilerplate once, you just copy-paste from one file to another then do a search-replace for the name etc - takes perhaps 10 seconds etc before you are writing logic.

I would like the Angular team to add some sort of "official" state management feature though in the future. In my view, it is the biggest missing gap in the library and you either have to use NgRX as a separate library, or have to botch a global app state by using either a Service or a convoluted @Input/@Output chain

I then tried React and it just kind of made sense. Since then from the sidelines I've heard Angular has gotten much better but personally don't see any reason to use anything other than React at this point in time.

Popularity is not a useful metric when evaluating frameworks. Community engagement and core team motivation are, and some people may use popularity as a proxy for those measurements.

That said, I think, for bigger groups/companies working on a complex product, I can see that Angular ensures a certain level of "architecture" and code organized correctly instead of being coded to each dev's personal style.

But way too complex for single-person apps or for simple SPAs.

All that to say Angular is less popular because it is too complex to learn and use quickly.

React: Write a function that generates a piece of HTML. Use standard event handlers to manage user interactions. Update state via setState methods. Ship it.

React seems a bit better, but they don't seem to support older releases at all.