Angular is an absolute joy to work with as a framework, improving year after years, not scared of shifting heavily when a new favorable paradigm comes in. You never had data to prove that angular sucks because all the benchmarks don't say so.

> The Pokémon app is small and doesn’t represent a large, complex real-world application.

If you aim to make small apps that don’t represent complex real-world applications you should not use Angular.

But blanket statements like yours are what I hate the most in software industry.

When I was running a small dev agency with a sprinkling of web projects, Angular was useful because it every project looked more or less the same. The rigidity (and verbosity) it imposed was an advantage in this setting, as it helped with the cognitive load when switching between projects. Apart from that, I wasn’t a fan either.

I suspect that results would be different if the app was a bunch of boring forms with complex validation rules, which is often encountered in jobslop.

Not necessarily that Angular would win that, but I imagine that it would at least significantly shuffle the order.