React's benefit was absolutely technical. Its component model and one-way data binding was so much simpler to reason about and elegant than Angular. So much so that they ended up copying it in Aungular 1.6 and Angular 2.x.

One of the biggest criticisms at the time (And perhaps still now) was that it wasn't opinionated at all. It didn't make assumptions as to how to do routing, or to fetch data, or to handle state. The community eventually converged towards a handful of solutions, like redux, but it was easy for each project to have its own combination of flavours and patterns.

Angular was an all-batteries-included MVC framework, with DI, testing framework, and one true way to do things. The reason why it's harder to introduce very low quality code in React is because React is just functions, returning JSX, executing when the function parameters change.

On the other hand, angular had comically large footguns due to its very high complexity. Have a look at the legacy documentation, the page about "scopes" by itself is longer and introduces more concepts than the entire "Thinking in react" page.

> One of the biggest criticisms at the time (And perhaps still now) was that it wasn't opinionated at all. It didn't make assumptions as to how to do routing, or to fetch data, or to handle state. The community eventually converged towards a handful of solutions, like redux, but it was easy for each project to have its own combination of flavours and patterns.

> Angular was an all-batteries-included MVC framework

As said back then, React is just the "V" in "MVC".