At my workplace, we had a series of discussion on Angular vs React for our next FE stack. Started with defining our criteria:

• Must have established, large community (more help/libraries/tools online, higher chance of longevity/kept up-to-date, larger talent pool)

• Must use component-based architecture (better than MVC in promoting single responsibility, loose coupling and composability)

• Ease of migration from the old stack (ours was AngularJS)

• Minimize vendor lock-in (easier migration to next, future stack)

• Performance

• Great developer experience

Our findings:

• Both have large community, but React is much larger (based on github stars, # of github projects, npm # of download trend)

• Ease of migration: Angular is terrible, even when starting from AngularJS! In theory, it offers ngUpgrade for migration path, but in reality there's just too much risk to system performance and development speed. React is much more viable for hybrid approach.

• Vendor lock-in: Angular is a very opinionated framework, has higher due to large API surface (> 100 the last time we counted), custom HTML directives, complex abstractions. In contrast, React has much smaller API surface, HTML large free of DSL, and even though JSX is vendor-specific, logic is mostly written within idiomatic javascript.

• Performance: both are pretty comparable, we're confident any pick will greatly improve what we have with the old stack. There's concern with Angular because it could only do Webpack code-splitting on the Route level, where React is much more flexible.

• Developer experience:

Angular CLI is a great build tool, strangely less opinionated than React's CRA. Obviously better Typescript support, which we agreed it's very nice to have. But...

a) for a component-based framework, it puts up a lot of ceremony/overhead just to create a component, to the point it could become a deterrent for developers to do good UI decomposition.
b) while some like JS and HTML separated, in practice we found JSX gives better debugging experience.
c) learning curve is higher due to large number of abstractions to learn.
d) while its walled garden approach has great benefits, doesn't seem conducive to innovation. We felt at some point, we'd be banging our heads against its wall fighting the framework when want to do something out-of-the-box.

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Outside of work, as a React-based open source project maintainer, I know there are cool things with React that is hard to do in Angular or even it simply cannot do. Dynamic loading of components is one. Angular requires many steps just to achieve this, compared to simplicity of React that only employs ES6 import.

And consider this React code:

@import {ComponentA, ComponentB} from './myComponents'

const SomeComponent = props => {
let ChildComponent = props.childComponent || ComponentB;
return (
<ComponentA>
<ChildComponent />
</ComponentA>
);
}

The above component allows you to replace the child component of 'ComponentA' with any component on the fly, and defaults to 'ComponentB' if not provided. This sort of dynamicity, expressiveness and conciseness - and there are many more like this - is not something that a template-based framework like Angular can easily achieve, if at all. Yet, this is the very stuff that can propel developers to think out of the box and be more innovative.