What has AngularJS ever done for us?

I'll tell what the Romans didn't give us, they didn't give us decent documentation, that's what!

Rails had the same civilising effect, and the same mild backlash when people eventually grew out of it.

Heavy but well thought out frameworks, we salute you! (Even if we don't use you for new projects anymore.)

Angular is not a framework, it's a very naughty boy. Now piss off. (Actual quote from Sergey Brin)

Single page apps are the problem. Angular made a bad idea more achievable. For this it deserves blame, not praise.

Everything else falls out from that: if you don't try to pull off a gigantic SPA, you don't need all the rest of the crap on the client side because your given unit of UI is much smaller than the entire app.

People will eventually look at angular the way they look at J2EE. "Great community support, corporate standard, lots of documentation, no one ever got fired..."

Author here. I do like AngularJS but I believe you can swap "the Romans" for many different languages and frameworks. Sort of a tools versus getting things done argument.

You can get great dependency injection with steal.js http://stealjs.com/

CanJS http://canjs.com/ can do single page apps, data-binding, and is modular, though it takes a little more configuration than Angular. You might appreciate its ability to be configured though.

You don't need Angular and all its troubles!

Dependency Injection and Modularity are not the same thing. Modularity implies swappability, whereas Angular typically involves a "controllers space" or silo'd services.

AngularAMD is interesting. It's really nice to load jQuery on a per-route basis, where I can isolate module dependencies and generally think of plugins to my applications from an external perspective. RequireJS facilitates an ecosystem where plugins AND modules exist side by side. AngularJS doesn't account for plugins (and "pages" are interesting combinations of modules and plugins which also can sit on the same level), which sit on the same level as modules.