React is not "eating Angular's lunch". The only reason it seems that way is that it is impossible to have a conversation about Angular on the internet without a horde of React zealots turning up and banging on about it.

Recommending React to somebody who's considering Angular is like recommending tyres to somebody who's shopping for a car.

React is eating Angulars lunch when you look at the amount of large enterprises that choose react over Angular.

Part of the problem with Angular that no one seems to care about is that Angular 2 was such a big change from Angular 1 it forced companies that depended on Angular 1 to do a complete re-write.

I was an Angular 1 dev and Angular 2 caused me to abandon Angular altogether.

Angular also adds more abstractions on top of JS which is unnecessary and can cause unexpected behavior when transpiled.

Angular is still a lot more prevalent than React in most of the world. A lot of the big companies using React also use Angular - it's not so simple.

Most companies are doing the responsible thing and holding off on worrying about migration until Angular 2 stabilizes more. Even if one wanted to do a complete rewrite due to poor Angular 1 app code, one can then evaluate all options from scratch and choose the best option for their app.

Every library adds abstractions on top of JS - React is no different with your complaint of unexpected behavior.

This reads as an overly emotional post without applying engineering - "this sounds too hard so I'll just run away to another solution" is the vibe I get.

I have the feeling they're both just for a different crowd.

React is not the only competitor either. Aurelia and Vue are there to make up for react's problems.

Mithril is also a pretty good competitor.

http://mithril.js.org/

And there will be something that will eat React's lunch soon too, just a matter of time.

Just out of curiosity what exactly can you do with React that you can't with Angular 2?

React lets you summarize your framework in a single sentence: make your UI a pure function of your model, but keep performance. OTOH, I still don't understand what the deal with Angular is.

Angular is an ORM for the DOM. With an ORM it's: "here's my model, figure out what to do to the database". With Angular it's "here's my model, figure out what to do to the DOM". Some people hate ORMs because there's too much magic, other's like them because they let one think about other parts of the app more.

How is Angular any different than React in the way that it allows you to bind models to the DOM? They're both component based, you have to specify the template and backing logic in both.

Implicit vs explicit binding.

That's sounds great but it does not really play out in a real world if you need to animate transitions to make UI look nice for example.

I disagree. CSS animations work very well and offer better performance. You can maintain the animation lifecycle by the React lifecycle callbacks and use of setTimeout

CSS animations do not work when you need to morph distinct components in complex coordinated manner. They are significantly slower then velocity js. Doing things available with quality solutions such as Ember liquid-fire are simply not possible.

Animations work really well with React!

The Animated library (originally from React Native) gives you some pretty basic but powerful primitives to build whatever animation you need.

On route transition you want to animate morphing unrelated components between before transition components and after transition components. You will not be able to do this in functional manner. You will not be able to do this with CSS animations. Example of how this is done with Ember liquid fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq_BcIFM8Rc

React with redux allows to write most of the code in a purely functional / no side effects manner, which makes testing code almost a joy.

I've used flux and redux in angular for years. You can write purely functional directives. Angular is much more than just a view library. I've built quite a bit in both react and angular.

That's nice but then you don't have the "angular is the standard and I don't have to choose anything" advantage anymore.

But my code is more flexible, less dependent on the framework it's deployed in. So I can more easily survive things like "migrate to ng2"

You can use Redux with almost anything including Angular 2. The purely functional manner is only an option if you Ok with providing subpar user experience (need to provide quality cross component animated transition that no side effects functional thing goes out of the window really fast). Given modern tooling the testing point is also a bit overstated.

What exactly do you mean? What is better then having a reliable, easy to write unit tests which cover most of the logic and run very fast?