Similar situation here, but it depends on your level of experience as well. Can you structure an AngularJS app so that it's (relatively) sane? Absolutely. It's also very easy to make a mess of things so that it's hard to reason about control flow; frameworks that are doing a better job of embracing unidirectional dataflow definitely help with this, but I don't blame Angular as it predates the wide adoption of that as a practice.
It's also more difficult to follow practices like quickly rendering above the fold content; when you use the normal practice of writing re-usable directives, you end up needing to wait until at least Angular and any dependencies are loaded prior to being able to render any content at all. Server side rendering of initial content helps to alleviate that quite a bit since even though the content may not be interactive until your app bootstraps, the perceived load time is much better as the user has something to look at.
Oh totally agree. There are some really nasty bugs we've had to deal with because of the lack of strictly controlled data flow. Still not all that bad.
Angular front-end, C# "middleware" to Java services layer. I was actually guessing when I tossed off 500k. I went and looked and it's actually closer to 250. Still pretty big though.
I've used react personally and like it rather well. I think it's much better than Angular, but I still don't think that Angular represents the 9th circle of hell, as seems to be implied above.
I think most libraries should be compared based on their worst-case implementations. As in, the "worst" react code is still much better than the "worst" angular code.
I've used Angular a good bit, seems fine to me. Last place I worked probably had around 20-30k lines of Angular code. It wasn't perfect, but it was way better organized and easier to understand than a much smaller project (~1k lines) done with JQuery and handmade paging system.
Exactly. Intuitively, I don't think the problem can be solved with the same "let's glue together a bunch of stuff and call it a stack" approach that got us here.
I'm hoping it is. We have ended up with really good tools compared to what we had before. Think about using commonjs requires, compared to the craziness of the Rails asset pipeline and sprockets, or manually specifying js files.
The best part will be when we're all standardized on ES2015 modules instead of commonJS modules. I agree with you that CommonJS requires are nice to use, but since they're not statically analyzable the way ES2015 imports are, optimizing compilers like the Closure Compiler can't really analyze your entire application, including its dependencies.
Once we've completely made the ES2015 transition (at least for front end modules), we might be in a position to see some really great front end tooling.
The approach itself yielded the issues such as that you reference, which have only been partially resolved by subsequent iterations of the same approach. I don't believe we should give credit for an approach that yields what is still a net-negative.
It's a new thinking that we need, not reluctant acceptance of the best sub optimal execution the old thinking can deliver.
