lol it would work fine. I've had a joke app running Angular 2.0 in production for years. The code doesn't just expire and break. If you upgrade to Angular 8 in your package.json without running the upgrade schematics, yes it will break...because there were breaking changes.
In 2016 React was on version 14. Are you telling me that from version 14 to 16.12 React has had ZERO breaking changes? Because they definitely haven't. That ecosystem has also changed recommended patterns countless times. They just choose to leave a lot of the old implementation options around if they can while Angular as a frameworks tends to be more opinionated.
Same goes for any library or framework across major versions...
> Because they definitely haven't. That ecosystem has also changed recommended patterns countless times.
You can just ignore the "ecosystem". You don't need it. React pretty much only does one thing. It doesn't impose an architecture on you. If you want to go all-in on the ecosystem, maybe it's as bad or worse than Angular. That's besides my point.
> Same goes for any library or framework across major versions...
No it doesn't. Some or even most people working with Javascript are completely out of touch with software engineering practices outside of the web bubble. Breaking changes are supposed to be avoided at great cost. Of course there's no real incentive for that if you're a random person pushing something to npm, or if you're Google and your business model is selling users instead of software.
In 2016 React was on version 14. Are you telling me that from version 14 to 16.12 React has had ZERO breaking changes? Because they definitely haven't. That ecosystem has also changed recommended patterns countless times. They just choose to leave a lot of the old implementation options around if they can while Angular as a frameworks tends to be more opinionated.
Same goes for any library or framework across major versions...