Wasn't there some kind of huge upgrade pain between versions (v1 to v2 I think it was) for people?
I vaguely remember talking with some folks at work who were trying to upgrade at one point, and they ended up changing frameworks entirely (to react) because the effort to upgrade was considered "about the same as a rewrite".
That is certainly the case. Google's decision for Angular have made millions of lines of code legacy over night.
The real reason it ever got traction in my opinion was the built in dependency injection. It solved a real problem at the time, but ES6 modules make it a lot less appealing now.
v1 and v2 were completely separate frameworks with essentially no upgrade path.
I don't know anyone who used angular v2+ (although I'm sure many did) but have personally been on two teams who ported to react. It burned a lot of people.
I vaguely remember talking with some folks at work who were trying to upgrade at one point, and they ended up changing frameworks entirely (to react) because the effort to upgrade was considered "about the same as a rewrite".