I never understood why Angular was so popular. Even Google realizes this, and with every single iteration of Angular they have almost completely re-written it...and still haven't gotten it right. I heard they recently got rid of it and moved to Dart. Smart move!
Angular used to be my weapon of choice for a few years. While it's been easy to get started with Angular, over time we found the code to be not very maintainable with a weird mix of HTML and directives. Also, performance tended to suffer as the application grew we created a lot of DOM elements (unlike React's shadow DOM implementation was better). Eventually, I gave it up in favor of React and never looked back.
I don't like Angular because it mistakenly portrays itself as the global galactic framework. Using it requires a lot of unnecessary knowledge.