Yeah. But they got selected by the ecosystem because they were GREAT homegrown solutions. While Angular was an accidental success, it seems that Facebook really grasped early on what was happening with React, (we all benefited from the Angular experience, warts and all) and really put in the resources necessary to make React successful, for the benefit of all.
The only way I benefited from Angular was when all the companies who let the front-end dev come lately's talk them into using it; realized they had been sold a bill off goods and needed someone to get them out of their Angular mess. I made a good living off of getting people out of Angular 1's mess. The reality is Angular 1 was poor, it was so poor that the developers decided that they has missed the mark so much that they needed a complete rewrite to make a good product. Why people stuck with them after that is beyond me. I can still vividly remember taking over my first angular project and realizing that the devs that built it where so green that they had misused common concepts and terminology like what scope means and what state means and had conflated the two into a mess.
Angular was bad and it's ashamed that it's hype pretty much relegated better toolkits like Dojo and MooTools to the dustbin of history.
> they got selected by the ecosystem because they were GREAT homegrown solutions
While React has lots of great ideas, good marketing and the facebook brand is really what boosted its popularity. Popular does not necessarily mean great. There must be some other great homegrown frameworks out there, but we have never heard of them, since they did not start out as a facebook or google homegrown framework.
> it seems that Facebook really grasped early on what was happening with React,
This just is not accurate. React has also evolved a lot since its inception, they've just been careful about maintaining backwards compatibility compared to angular.
