I know what they mean when they say 'it was always because we were using it wrong'. Last place I worked used Angular 1 for their product reboot, and any time I hit a dead end I'd lookup the problem on stackoverflow only to find I wasn't doing things 'the angular way'. Generally this would be because I'd decided to mix in JQuery and alter some of the visual tree myself (something angular is meant to exclusively take care of).

At the end of the day, when you're writing commercial software in a big team you are inevitably going to have to join up technologies whether you or angular likes it or not. Angular 1 decided to make this a PITA, so I can't ultimately recommend it for use. I haven't looked into Angular 2 though.