But then I tried react and the whole idea of unidirectional event flow made sense, JSX was a little confusing but it was simple to grasp the need and use of it.
I really like the acknowledgment that UIs are fundamentally state machines, and React's explicit connection between state and rendering. I do wish they would introduce more featured state transition/events modeling...Something similar to Jake Gordon's javascript-state-machine[1] library would be amazing.
That annoys everybody. It's that way because the JSX attributes map directly onto the DOM attributes which in turn are named that way to avoid ES3 reserved keywords. It's supposed to be less magic/surprising but far more people interact with JSX (e.g. designers) than work with raw DOM manipulation.
Not really. Angular is its own little world of terminology and ideas. I've heard it said that Angular users don't learn JavaScript, they learn Angular.
The concepts on Angular have nothing to do with JavaScript. The new changes they propose to JavaScript borrow most from Dart, which in the eyes of a JavaScript programmer is an attempt to turn JavaScript into Java.