Same experience here.

I wish Angular dropped their weird compiler that's tight coupled to tsc and moved into more pluggable approach so you can use it with whatever TS compiler. App and unit test cold build times are still crap, but at least with a coding agent you care about this less.

What is rough in the ecosystem? I haven't had any issues finding packages. Most packages have been keeping up with the signal trends as well.

Are projects still chosing to pick RxJS (or equivalent) which make the code heavily layered and a pain to debug?

Or has sanity reached the Angular ecosystem by now?

Maybe I'm dumb, but I go to: https://angular.dev/guide/aria/overview#showcase and try out the keyboard controls, somehow they've decided that those elements should be navigated with the arrow keys instead of much more commonly used tab and shift+tab? Even the tabs from their own documentation, right above that example, also uses tab/shift-tab for moving focus between them.

Could you say more about signals? Is it are all analogous to, say, game engine signals paradigms (eg Godot) - components at any depth emit signals and any other component can subscribe? Or something totally different?

Or I mean, you could just use Django (or some faster backend with templating and SSR). Using that with htmx you get the SPA experience and still without the madness of an actual rotten JS ecosystem.

Signals are a privative data structure in Angular, hence core. Signal-based forms are part of the Forms module. You aren't using forms, you don't get the overhead.

There are a lot of ways to do Forms in Angular. I assume that's importing the new "Signals" based form.

What kinds of features or workflows are you missing that Angular's CLI doesn't cover? Or is it just that you're used to Vite (or something else) and wish you could use that instead of Angular's own tooling?

I'm not on the Angular development team or anything, though I do use Angular at $DAY_JOB and I'm overall perfectly fine with the framework and its tooling. However, the grass might be greener elsewhere; I'm just not familiar with it!

for many people this is the biggest bonus

Angular Control Flow alone is a massive QoL improvement compared to the React way to do template conditions, switches, loops, etc.

https://angular.dev/guide/templates/control-flow

Modern Angular is MUCH nicer to use than the v2 days (or even the v4 days when I first started working with it). A lot of the required boilerplate is unnecessary nowadays. And even RxJS and NgRX are becoming less and less necessary to use too, which is great.

When I look at job postings and see "React" I go "ugh" these days and find myself looking for Angular instead. That's the complete opposite of my thoughts from just two years ago.

I would still rather use something else (instead or React or Angular) but 1) most jobs in my area are asking for one of those, and 2) I'm actually starting to lean towards Angular even for personal projects.

Angular is great these days, and they're making really nice improvements.

Have you used it in the last 8 years? Its actually quite a good piece of software.