Neither orphaned, nor dead-end, just declining in popularity, but not a concern when you still work with jQuery. The reason I picked Angular 1.5 as the suggest

Neither orphaned, nor dead-end, just declining in popularity, but not a concern when you still work with jQuery. The reason I picked Angular 1.5 as the suggestion is that you can still learn it the old-fashioned way: - Load it from a CDN and start coding, no NPM or Bower required at all - No build process or transpilers (ex. Typescript / Babel / JSX) - No decisions for dependencies (ex. Gulp vs Webpack / Flux vs Redux / Enzyme vs Mocha / etc.) Rather than overwhelming a developer with the current state of affairs, it should be better if he can begin focusing in the DOM-less paradigm and basic concepts like Data Binding. You may not get to know the new hotness like ES6 and Live Reload when you begin learning Angular, but it's pretty unlikely that a jQuery developer will miss them anyway, whatever, it's pretty likely that they will learn about them when they begin researching about tools like Babel and Webpack. OTOH, Angular 1.5 backported components from Angular 2, so the transition from Angular to React will feel more familiar, and you can get away without learning Angular-specific concepts like custom directives, the mundane details are abstracted away with components. Finally, the requirement is to learn the basics, not the entire framework, I also agree that investing time in Angular 1.5 is not worth it, but it is worth getting a high level understanding of it, since tools like Vue assume some familiarity with that high level understanding. It's not the same learning Vue when you're an Angular developer, than learning Vue with a blank canvas. At the end of the day Vue is the Angular's Zepto.js