You advise to use an abondoned tech (Angular 1), that was full of unstable plugins and hard to use setups while it was active, instead of a simple to use view layer like React?

The api surface of Angular is way too big to invest in, compared to the alternatives, of which there are many. ReactJS is vastly more popular for a reason, even though it arrived at a time when Angular already had a big following and huge momentum.

If you have a super simple front-end with few variables you don't need a framework anyway. Vanilla JS is fine. But React+Redux is killer once it starts to grow into a big SPA.

I don't disagree with you advice re: React.

Angular 1's commit graph shows it is far from abandoned, though: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/graphs/contributors

From what I've seen, Angular 1 is used in so many enterprise projects that some big companies would probably be willing to pay for continued development and support for years, should anyone be willing to provide it.