RxJS is central to how it does things - it is so tightly integrated that it is part of the single distribution as far as I know.
Edit: appears it is a separate dependency in terms of package.json (along with zone.js, but I believe that is due to be removed in future versions). I would not expect any issues with managing dependency diffs between angular and RxJS though.
Yeah it was a bit of a learning curve in the old days, but promises and async concepts are so prevalent now in vanilla js that most people seem to be able to handle the basics without much hassle and be at least productive. I guess it depends how crazy you go with flatmap and zips and taps etc - most code I see these days usually have very simple pipe() sections compared to several years ago.
Angular v17+ can use Signals instead of RxJS in a lot of cases, reducing the need to learn RxJS in great detail. State management will probably rely on behaviours for another version or two, but expect that to change as well :)
