Unlike most people, I've written both Angular and React extensively: I've shipped both Angular and React web applications in enterprise settings.
I wouldn't characterize my time in React spent "all day comparing open source packages" -- if that's what you think web application development on React looks like on a day-to-day basis, you haven't done much on it.
To be clear, I do not intend to speak negatively about Angular. Some people love the provided structure. It's also not for some other people. This is okay. Different things make different developers happy. I wasn't generally describing all people's sentiment: that would be insane, both frameworks have huge backing. If you'd like to understand more about how some people view the framework as inflexible, and you're open to that perspective, I'm glad to shine some light on it.
I was mostly responding to this line “ It's hard to take pride and ownership in your work when 90% of everything has been decided for you,” Which in my kind is just a weird thing to say and seemed to imply a general statement.
A lot of comments state angular is inflexible and opinionated, but come from people who haven’t used the framework. They think your forced to do a lot of things where angular gives you choice.
I haven’t done much react development, but my significant other has and multiple members of my team have as well, and I’ve heard them discuss how when you need to find a package to pull in it’s a decision that involves searching and weighing the pros and cons much more then for angular.
I don’t hate react at all and totally understand its pros and how I think it’s a net positive on the web development landscape. It’s more that this site is extremely react focused and biased, and the US dev community is also that way. So angular gets called out as being something stupid to use that’s cumbersome, slow and big, but that’s just simply not the case. Example of angular app being smaller and faster then comparable react: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/a-real-world-comparison-of.... I know these comparisons are silly so I’m not putting much thought into it, just one anecdote.
Both are great libraries/frameworks with great ecosystem of developers, we all need to stop flaming each other and see the progress each community is making. It’s not a winner take all type deal, there’s plenty of room for both.
I wouldn't characterize my time in React spent "all day comparing open source packages" -- if that's what you think web application development on React looks like on a day-to-day basis, you haven't done much on it.
To be clear, I do not intend to speak negatively about Angular. Some people love the provided structure. It's also not for some other people. This is okay. Different things make different developers happy. I wasn't generally describing all people's sentiment: that would be insane, both frameworks have huge backing. If you'd like to understand more about how some people view the framework as inflexible, and you're open to that perspective, I'm glad to shine some light on it.