A good place to start a comparison is when using Vue.js in production looked viable - the October 2015 V1.0 release. At that point Angular has amassed 46k github stars, React had 35k.

Star counts don't tell us everything but they're an OK heuristic of how many people are invested in a library at a point in time. Had Vue.js been in anyway meh it wouldn't have made such a dent in people's attention.

Timing luck, insofar as it exists, is probably weighted towards arriving later. Vue had a chance to listen to the market and solve some of the headaches that developers were voicing about incumbents. V2.0 is basically the best bits of Angular and React.

Again, lots of lessons for product creators.

At that time React wasn't V1 either. Vue was used and adopted well before 1.0, I had apps for it in the v0.10 days.

Angular was released in 2010. Vue was released in 2014. Bit weird to call it "pretty old", and Angular was well established by then - they announced the v2 preview around the same time.

>>Vue was released in 2014.

That makes it pretty old. This is JavaScript we're talking about. :)

And Angular 2 is different enough from Angular 1 that it might as well be brand new. So I think the OP's comment is valid.

2014 was the year Angular "really took off" and 2015 was the year React "really took off" (at least, if we trust "Google Trends")

Vue is, in its core, very similar to Knockout (which I think is pretty swell). I think coupled with a better DOM abstraction (like React) it can do great thing - that's what MobX does and why I like it.

I sympathize with the post's sentiment of giving UI people work.

It was around, but I don't think it was as mature. At the time React was becoming viable, I recall the VueJS api being pretty unstable (e.g. functionality being added in, then removed, then added back in, basic patterns being completely changed, etc).