Recently started developing a client side web app using Angular v 20. The app is quite complex, with about 40 components many of them nested, about 7 to 8 "pages", data dashboards, multiple forms, continuously updating data from server, etc. There substantial amount of data flow in the application.

So far, the experience has been absolutely wonderful, particularly, given the context of myself as a developer in the whole process, which is,

1. I am a seasoned developer, mainly doing python stuff, back-end servers, desktop applications, data applications, etc. Very little exposure to front-end tech.

2. I keep myself updated with the concepts, patterns & architecture of front-end systems, because I am extremely into design and good UI.

3. I am at a stage where I can do basic web apps with Vue, React, Angular & vanilla HTML and JS.

With Angular Signals and concept of Stores, Services and Dependency Injection, I am able to handle data flow very easily, am able to add features to the app in a consistent manner, able to debug and trace errors with relative ease.

I have earlier read NextJS docs, Remix Docs and read tutorials about developing react apps using Vite. It has always been a confusing maze of stuff. Perhaps I am getting old (about to touch 40), but I have been programming for about 25 years now and I was able to carve out the architecture I want in an Angular app with ease.

Also, this app is going to be a production app, and is critical for my work, so its an impactful decision, which, thankfully, I have been happy and pleasantly surprised with.

It could be that I could have chosen React, and end up with the same thing, but, somehow, in the extensive tech stack selection process that I took up before committing to Angular (which involved testing out core mechanisms of the application in React, Vue & Angular), I felt very much at home with Angular way of things.

I've worked on many very large Angular applications I've always loved working with it. I have worked with plenty of React but I avoid Next.js like the plague after reading through documentation / examples / blog posts.

I was in the trenches pre-ES6 with JavaScript and JS/CSS since the year they came out, so of course I do love KISS-style bare-bones websites when that is the proper tool for the job. But certainly not for anything at scale. Angular, being a framework and not a library, is perfect for those purposes. I prefer that it IS opinionated (no "what router does this project use?"), and I also would not develop anything these days without TypeScript (even small sites).

To each their own.

Meanwhile, I've been looking for a while and if they want a full stack or a FE developer it's always, always React. Rarely if ever Angular, occasionally Vue or Svelte, and never Phoenix.

I recall back in the day when Struts was everywhere, some of us figured out it was because Struts was a trap that took twice as many devs to get anything done, and that's why there are so many openings for it. Every time I look at React, I just wonder if it is the new Struts.

The old Angular apps I worked on (heck that was before AngularJS and Angular split) was pretty decent. Long argument lists were a big problem, sure, but the whole Service layer was one of the smartest features I've seen in a framework in a while. Second only to Routes. It saved us leaking a bunch of impedance mismatches across the entire codebase. It gave us some place to stash code while we asked the backend team to change their APIs.