Though I understand the complaints about this not being the most apples-to-apples comparison, I do think there is value in this article. For instance,
The best feature we found with React is that never, even once, did we have to read its code.
Developing Angular applications is a lesson in learning how Angular works, which means you're not learning how the software should work. You need to know far too much about the internals of Angular to successfully build applications with it, which means it's failed as a framework.
The simple presence of "link" and "compile" thingies in 90% of the directives is a testament that Angular does spill its guts and is not really simple and intuitive. It annoys me to no end because in the end 95% of developers will end up copy-pasta'ing stuff from the (horrible) docs or StackOverflow without really getting it. And the thing is, they're right, they should never have to care about post-link and compile and whatnot.
I mean don't get me wrong Angular is a great framework that opened a lot of possibilities for a lot of people and I'm glad it exists but it's a strange mix of "dead simple" and "oh my god kill me now" levels of sophistication.
My full-time job involves Angular, and I have to agree. I tried React briefly, and it was much easier because I didn't have to deal with understanding how the internals worked.
I think the documentation has been the biggest sore spot. With React there's a certain lifecycle and within a few minutes I understood what's happening. With AngularJS it feels like the lifecycle's explanation is spread out everywhere and the usefulness of some components isn't clearly explained.
This is why Rails and Django succeeded; amazing docs that walk your through step by step but also amazing reference docs in case you forget anything.
The Angular team's choice to use a custom doc framework shot themselves in their feet.
A custom doc framework could have been a boon, if they had put as much effort into it as is really needed. The problem is that they have a custom solution AND that custom solution doesn't meet their needs.
The best feature we found with React is that never, even once, did we have to read its code.
Developing Angular applications is a lesson in learning how Angular works, which means you're not learning how the software should work. You need to know far too much about the internals of Angular to successfully build applications with it, which means it's failed as a framework.