Stickit author, here. To be clear, stickit will not make your "zombie views grow fatter" or contribute to any memory problems. In fact, stickit cleans up all of its model and view bindings automatically on view.remove(), and provides an optional api for manual cleaning view.unstickit().

The blog author's problem was a brief bug that was introduced and fixed between releases for the rare use case when a data-bound view is re-rendered. We fixed this problem and the author confirmed that the patch was "working great."

https://github.com/NYTimes/backbone.stickit/issues/66

So even though the problem was fixed for the blog author before he moved onto angular, he still claims that stickit causes memory problems. I guess a false claim like that makes the story of moving to a new framework more entertaining.

Another claim from the blog author is that stickit makes it hard to use third-party plugins like Chosen. Around the same time he filed the github issue, we were finishing and getting ready to release "handlers" and a new "initialize" binding which give you the ability to create global handlers for setting these kinds of bindings up. More on handlers here:

http://nytimes.github.io/backbone.stickit/#custom-handlers

... and an example of setting up a global handler for Chosen:

http://jsfiddle.net/px6UP/28/