Sometimes running into AngularJS was not too bad of an experience, since it's relatively simplistic when compared to what's needed to get it running (no complicated toolchain, such as with TS -> JS).

But most of the times it's a pain, because of it not scaling well to larger projects. I've actually seen projects where controllers grow to the length of thousands of lines because the developers didn't feel comfortable with introducing new ones in the pre-existing codebase, due to how the scoping works, due to how they'd need to set up the data models and care about initialization of everything, as well as custom integrations with validation libraries and other JS cruft (due to it not quite being "battieries included", like the new Angular is).

Now personally, i really liked how they did error messages (which gave you URLs that you could navigate to, with a bit of context in them; though it would be better with a locally hosted docs server), but a lot of things were awkward, such as their binding syntax: https://blog.krawaller.se/posts/dissecting-bindings-in-angul...

Luckily, AngularJS seems to finally be dead, so we'll get to migrate to something else soon, hopefully. And the projects that won't will be red flags enough for the people who don't like such challenges to turn the other way - truly a litmus test of sorts.