I think what is often neglected is that it is about the architecture. 8 years ago, React didn't even have Typescript Declarations and even if it did, how many times did you refactor your state management and each component as a result?
Before Angular, many companies (outside of the major players) were just eval() and doing absolutely outrageous inheritance chains with crazy levels of JQuery dependencies and mismanagement.
As someone who made a choice in a 3 man team 8 years ago and having scaled the product to 58 developers. We are all fairly happy with our small bugbears.
Should we progress to another framework, we hope for the genuinely valuable opinionated way of doing things that has allowed us to grow as we have.
I am happy to hear Angular has been working great for you. Angular is a great framework and I still think there is a place for Angular. Just not in our codebase.
I originally went with Angular for the same reason. Back then React's TypeScript support wasn't great and I didn't want that in my code. I love TypeScript and wanted to keep using that.
Regarding state management, I would say we had same amount of rewrite on both ends. The good news is that we are pretty solid on our state management now for the most part.
We are still a small team, Angular just adds more work for us. When we were onboarding a developer who had zero experience with Angular, they required more guidance and took them much longer to become productive. With React, we've seen developers became more productive significantly faster.
