I'm coming back to JS development after several years away and my first impressions of Angular are that it seems very complicated and over-engineered, with a lot of fairly abstract concepts to digest to get even simple things working. React.js seems so much simpler but there does seem to be a lot of community support for Angular. Should I invest the time and learn Angular or go with React instead? Web components seem…
...It seems easy enough (given that I haven't actually taken something through what I'm about to suggest...) to go from zero independent JS - only using existing directives - smoothly and gradually into a full browser-side MVC. Start with directives, add some controllers, now a service or two and eventually some routing....
I also recently finished my first big feature using Angular, and am now ripping out most of the guts because I've realized that The Angular Way would let me do things drastically simpler. So I think there's some actual simplicity in how you can use it that may be hard to spot at first, or may not be apparent when you're coming from a different cognitive toolset (not that I know of anything other than Angular that I can for sure say has the same or a similar toolset...). As I grok it more, I like it more, but some stuff still gives me issue. I just don't use those parts until I understand, and then I delete the two-thirds of my code I don't actually need.
Also: I don't know ReactJS, so don't take this as a comparison to it in any way.