Popularity with developers who reply to surveys is not the only factor in whether it is used. There's loads of sites that would need maintaining already written in Angular.

There are lots of new projects being written in Angular as well. Just not in the United States, Canada, or Australia.

Did you look for jobs in Germany only? Because Angular is quite popular in Germany. I guess this is because in Germany, freelance devs mostly do "enterprise stuff" (for car manufacturers) and Angular is "the enterprise framework".

Yeah, that's my guess as well. Angular leaves you with fewer choices on how to structure your application. In comparison React only provides you with the view layer and even for routing you have to rely on third party packages. I personally enjoy working with a lean library like React but I can see why enterprises tend to prefere Angular.

Reminds me of the prevalence of TYPO3 as a CMS in Germany, which doesn't seem to have a big following anywhere else.

Vue is popular outside the workplace. React is still the tool of industry. Plenty of Angular stuff out there too.

The survey highlights what devs want to do out of interest, not necessarily because that's where the job market is.