AngularJS was indeed a bit of a pain when we switched to Angular 2+ and beyond, but it was so worth it. I chose it because of the skillset that our current (small) team has. There's no way our 'designer' (more an HTML/CSS guy) could have wrapped his head around JSX, the way it mixes scripts with layout markup. The way Angular separates concerns for us is great. And the components are extremely flexible and reactive a…
Oof. I work on an angular app and the build is slow as molasses because it's big. And we of course don't want to move away from the official build tool because build time improvements are always "right around the corner".
But the recent versions (and updating is also a breeze - mostly) should be faster. And particularly if you drop support for ES5 browsers.