I'm currently trying out a React + Backbone hybrid that seems very promising. It makes it possible to handle an infinite number of possible app states in a sane and predictable way. The tradeoff is setting it up and understanding all the libraries involved is probably beyond any "Make your first SPA tutorial". But then again none of the architectures in those TodoMVC would scale to a complex app.
I picked AngularJS because I'm not an expert at Javascript and will probably code myself into a mess if I started out with nothing and had to find third party libraries and structure the code myself. Maybe AngularJS is a bad idea if you're like the author and already have 5 year+ of JS experience and used to their existing development methods.
Not sure why the author think data-binding and declarative UI programming is trivial. When evaluating AngularJS and Backbone, AngularJS was much more productive to work with: code is much more succint, understandable and testable.
Backbone turned out to be a nest of binding and removing event handlers, no better than jQuery soup.
Regarding the 'too magical' argument, at some point developers accept abstraction and magic otherwise we'd all be coding in pure JS without libraries. AngularJS has clean abstractions that are understandable (especially for Java developers).
I work on both AngularJS and ASP.NET WebForms. In some cases, WebForms is the right choice and in some cases AngularJS is the go to choice. You just can't say AngularJS is worse.
"Witness the introduction of the frighteningly obscure “transclusion”. You could probably sum up AngularJS with this single word — it makes the inclusion of DOM fragments in your page sound novel and complicated — etc"
Are you mistaking "transclusion" for "directive" ?
