tl;dr: The author is asserting that React > Angular2 because he's already emotionally invested in the former. React's greatest strength is also its greatest we

tl;dr: The author is asserting that React > Angular2 because he's already emotionally invested in the former. React's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. It requires devs to compose their app out of multiple de-centralized parts. See 'javascript fatigue'. If your aim is to write an isomorphic React app, you CAN"T just use 'plain old javascript' or anything that touches the DOM. If you care about SEO, this is a very important implementation detail to consider. Angular2's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. It provides a unified API for building apps. It forces you to do things the 'angular way' which is no different from Angular1. So far Angular2 is heavily biased toward Typescript because it was written in TS and it was literally just released to beta 2 weeks ago. TS is good for devs bridging over from strongly-typed OOP languages, and TS provides better support for autocomplete in IDEs. TS is bad because it's not an 'official' standard and it may be an awkward transition for existing JS devs. TS is not required, I have been writing an Angular2 app in strictly ES6 despite the lack of documentation/support. Both: require transpilation; use observables (ie redux vs rxjs); use a HTML-like templating language for data binding; use the virtual DOM to speed up rendering; discourage mutating the DOM directly to encourage rendering on other platforms (ie mobile, isomorphic); require platform-specific shims that don't touch the DOM; etc... The underlying technologies of both are more similar than different. React favors a more decentralized architecture. Angular2 favors a more monolithic architecture. /axegrinding