The phylosophy behind react is that you can use standard JS techniques to write your template logic. Since angular uses a fully separate template language then

The phylosophy behind react is that you can use standard JS techniques to write your template logic. Since angular uses a fully separate template language then it needs to reinvent things like conditionals, loops, variable scoping, function definitions, function calls, etc. Compared to other virtual-dom/js-as-a-templating-language tools, the most unique thing about react is the way they handle having a hierarchy of stateful components. Virtual dom is very simple if you only have state at the root level and rerender 100% of the page when something changes but it gets a trickyer if you want to distribute the state in a hierarchical manner.