The 2019 popularity link isn't, and the technicality difference between AngularJS vs 2+ isn't incredibly relevant at this macro level when AngularJS's failures are very much a reason 2+ failed to be adopted. While it came with big changes, it's still not that significantly night and day different to act as if they aren't related.

You're right that MVC no longer applies, but Vue's components still beat Angular 2+ and the dev world seems to have spoken pretty loudly about feature preference/priority, and many of those mean Vue over Angular while leaving React a bit more in its own world.