Do people believe this about Angular? Not primarily a front end dev, but in my limited experience with React and Angular, it seems like Angular's strength is that it provides more structure for scaling to larger projects.
It's easy to learn, the code is super clean, TypeScript is great, and imo it generally just makes for a good work environment.
You say this like it's not an 8 year old framework. I wouldn't have such high hopes for it rising significantly.
- The number of round trips needed to render a page needs to go from 3 to 2.
- The amount of JavaScript in the core framework needs to be slimmed down.
The second is already on the roadmap -- they are making Zone.js optional, and supposedly the next version of RxJS is going to be significantly smaller. In order for this to actually happen, Google needs to keep funding the project for at least another full year, which seems likely given how much they depend on it. In terms of the former -- well, it seems increasingly likely that they'll work on adding those kinds of options to the CLI once they get through with the other stuff. And if not, you can alway go back to straight Webpack and just do it yourself. (I personally like the benefits of the CLI and not having to deal with Webpack, but if Webpack keeps improving then who knows, maybe I'll switch back.)