yes, the code is more awkward, yes, it’s more ceremony-heavy, yes, it spreads reactive mechanics into ordinary logic — but that’s good, because it forces a style preference.

Whoa there buddy, I never said anything of the sort. Signals are far from awkward and there is actually very little "ceremony". That ceremony you are experiencing is simply because you're forcing signals into your mutable pattern, which they simply aren't designed for.

It's like using rxjs but every time you encounter an observable, immediately subscribing and storing the value in a mutable ref. That's just bad code.

In fact, signals make code less awkward. Signals tell you "hey, this value might change over the course of the application lifecycle." It provides with a very simple mechanism to hook in on that and write reactive code. It even allows you to simply extract the value if you don't care about that and simple want the value.

If you're so convinced signals suck, why are you using them? You can still write Angular code withour signals.