Having written a handful of apps using Angular 1, I would say it's true that you have to learn Angular's way of doing things, but most of the code for the apps

Having written a handful of apps using Angular 1, I would say it's true that you have to learn Angular's way of doing things, but most of the code for the apps I've written is plain JS. Angular 2 no longer has its own module system, so that's one less Angular-specific thing you have to learn about.