Why does Angular need a build process? You can just point script tags at a fat angular.js file, or a CDN, and go on your merry way.

Sure it's not like the 10x dev way to do it, but I do it for simple apps all the time.

Same thing with React.

I think the overall point that you have to fill in the gaps yourself still stands, though. Angular just comes with way more features than React does, so if you want an equivalent experience, you have to use third-party libraries with React, which increases the amount of things you have to learn. Not that this is entirely a bad thing, but you can't really compare bare React to bare Angular and say they're equivalent.

Not sure if your point about the amount of things to learn is true. I prefer learning small utilities and compose them. The cognitive load is much more smaller (for me) than having to learn a giant monolith. I guess it's a matter of preference.

There are tradeoffs. The advantage of learning smaller libraries is that you only have to learn what you need. However, the advantage of a monolithic framework is that everything is integrated so nicely that, once you learn the framework, everything kind of "just works", and you don't have to spend time figuring out how to glue everything together. I personally prefer the former approach, but I also understand the appeal of a framework like Angular or Ember that makes all the high-level decisions for you.