I get your meaning about angular, it is nasty, it's bloated, and mastering angular can take months with all the crazy features it has.

That cannot be said about react or vue - I didn't work with react for 2 years now, and yet when I came back to it I immediately felt at home, without the burdens of angular, yes, I changed from react 14 to 16, I didn't feel the difference... With angular every version feels like a completely different framework.

As you said, angular isn't just UI it's a whole freaking set of tools, it's bloated, it's slow, it's cumbersome - but returning to js+templates like 10 years ago is not the solution, it can cost even more finding developers who want to go back 10 years instead of advancing their career and actually enjoy writing code.

Angular costs billions, but there is a reason all startups use react - it's efficient, it's quick to learn, it doesn't clutter your app with thousands of useless files.