How do you mean, "templates for non-programmers"?

I see Angular's directives as a pure convenience compared to most every templating engine I've used across languages, never considered it something that makes it accessible to non-programmers. I'd actually think someone who only knows html/css would be more thrown off from a page with random, unsanctioned (by W3C), tags and attributes that may or may not reveal what they actually do.

As a programmer I don't want to write long templates, I seriously prefer Jade/Pug for that reason. When I can't use them for a client I typically use them to do all initial work, compile them to HTML, then make whatever minor changes from there.

Consider ng-for:

  <div data-ng-for="y in x">
    <h1>{{y.title}}</h1>
  </div>

The ASP.Net solution is a pain, a function with HTML string template to dynamically add elements to a "runat" div.

This PHP example seems more idiomatic, at least to me, yet takes more to write

  <?php foreach($x as $y){ ?>
    <h1> <? echo $y->title; ?> </h1>
  <? } ?>

The JSP style is kinda similar to Angular, again maybe more idiomatic at first glance but still not as quick/simple to write

  <c:forEach items="${x}" var="y">
    <h1>${y.title}</h1>
  </c:forEach>

The jQuery/plain JS solution, especially before ES6 is not preferable by any means, especially beyond this simple example.

  var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];

  [...].map(function(y){
  body.innerHTML += 
    "<div>"+
     "<h1>"+y.title+"</h1>"+
    "</div>";
  });

Unlike all the other solutions, angular has 2 way data binding so when you programmatically add elements to the array in ng-for, they are added to the DOM without a reload.

So, is the goal of a programmer to simply write more code? If so, then Angular is definitely not for programmers.

Is the goal of a programmer to solve problems? If so, Angular is definitely a tool for programmers.