> Why waste time learning and suffering through AngularJS absurdities when ReactJS exists?
Because I'd have to suffer through learning and integrating Backbone or Flux in addition to React to accomplish what I could by learning just Angular. And then I'd have to hope that my choices remained compatible with each other through version updates. Anyway, I may find React to be a better designed lib when I get around to using it, but it's definitely not an apples to apples comparison when it's only attempting to tackle 1 of the pieces that Angular handles.
I'm in agreement with your point, but... if 'the market' wants angular... 'the market' is going to have a hell of a time dealing with a mess in a couple of years when many of the decision makers that mandated angular move on to something else and leave piles of mess behind for someone else to clean up.
Previously there was no the framework for web frontend development (like Rails for Ruby). From now on you will need convincing reasons to use anything else, even if it is clearly better. Moving on to something else will be much harder.
On the other hand my wish is not to get into stupid arguments at my new job :)
That's already happening. Two contacts came up in the last two weeks with Angular projects gone off the rails (pun intended).