Google didn't intentionally change the world in Angular 2 to make sure that developers were learning new Angular 2 stuff vs. something else. If they wanted to do that, they were too late, because a lot of people had moved to React already.

Angular 2 is so different because they were trying to fix all of the problems with Angular 1. In fact, Angular 2 didn't even settle on how to do that after starting early releases of Angular 2. But, that wasn't some secret conspiracy to get people to use it. If anything, a lot of people that were sold on Angular 1 are slower to migrate, but that's what they get for trying to do things right.