It's difficult to trace through Angular programs compared to say Express JS - express is a much cleaner framework than Angular which pollutes your HTML and Java

It's difficult to trace through Angular programs compared to say Express JS - express is a much cleaner framework than Angular which pollutes your HTML and JavaScript with lots of magic. "lots of magic" and "difficult to trace compared to x" sound a lot more reasonable than claiming AngularJS is an abomination, so I'll address those claims instead. Yes, magic in programming can be dangerous, but keep in mind that magic always has a logical explanation. In this case, the magic turns out to be a pretty mundane case of metaprogramming. If a developer can't understand how it might be possible to pattern match parameter identifiers in JavaScript, then I think AngularJS DI is the least of their worries. Maybe you are some sort of Angular savant who agrees with all the assumptions the authors made. I'll take that as a compliment, but I'm just a regular guy who has pushed a few medium sized angular apps into production. I definitely don't agree with all of angular's design decisions, but I don't have to agree with everything to use the framework effectively. In the early days of Django the had a magic removal branch for this very reason; people who do not understand the framework will find it harder to learn. Contrast that anecdote with Rails, a framework that has very successfully embraced the power of magic from the start to create what is arguably the most influential web framework of the last decade. It's an opinionated approach, but not inherently wrong. of course we abstract things but you should use the simplest possible abstraction for the job. Angular is not that. The simplest solution isn't always the best solution, if that were the case we wouldn't be discussing client side scripting in any capacity.