I used angular 1x for several projects. It's not too hard once you get your head wrapped around it. But I realized I could do most of what I needed with jquery, and the angular build environment is too complicated for what I need (e.g., you need node, npm, and a bunch of other libraries), so I dropped it.

You'll appreciate this...

  https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f

 LMAO  :-((

That's partly why we're sticking with good old Backbone/jQuery/Underscore at my job. Keepin it simple, plus the kind of stuff we make doesn't really need the real-time kind of things React is good at.

I'm growing less convinced that React is good at those kind of real-time things. Not when combined with all the crap it brings.

I don't recall if I've looked at Backbone before, but I'm guessing not - I just scanned the getting started stuff and it looks like the right kind of simple. I mean, the tinytext single page 800px website design is shite, but the explanations/philosophy/etc of Backbone suggest someone that knows what they're doing. I'm definitely going to have a play with it later.

It's kind of minimal, and very unopinionated, which is why we like it – it can fit in nicely with existing projects, and you can use just the parts you like (we mostly just use the Models and Views).