The problem with Angular 1 is that it was slow and bloated, relatively speaking. Google could have improved on that instead of starting from scratch, or ok, start from scratch but use a different name.

Restarting was honestly the best decision, they just had the wrong abstractions in AngularJS

It was! The new result just isn't all that much better. They got trapped in their own bubble of complexity.

I think it's a lot better than AngularJS 1.x was, the problem is that it isn't really better than it's competitors.

I don't know. I prototyped with Angular and it just seemed like one of those approaches that sorta made sense verbally but not at all on paper.

Like trying to take jQuery and make it a framework like React. But in their attempt to make it "simple" they made it useless. And then the next generation of frameworks like React came out and basically killed it.

You may not like it as a technology, but one search on recruitment sites will show you that it's far from dead.

Seems almost completely relegated to .Net shops though, at least where I live.

Im still om angularjs. Cant bother to learn new frameworks every other month. Also using Angularjs in recent projects i never ever thought I was hobbled. Angularjs,jquery,vue - doesnt matter which tool one use. If you know any of these at advanced level you can create anything

The initial release was 8 years ago. Surely, you've had at least an ounce of curiosity about how the front-end ecosystem has changed since then? Even if you didn't adopt it, just to maybe poke around and look at what React, Vue, et. al. are up to?

It's not be dismissive of what you currently do. But perhaps you might see new efficiencies that allow you to do more with less, with these newer solutions.

Absolutely; I was a very satisfied user of Angular.js, and if you have a project in it currently, I'm sure it works just fine. But you're also missing out on a whole lot if you're restricted to their now-clumsy module system, their now-clumsy unit testing setup, their custom syntax with no editor support, its limited ability to work with type checking...

All those are fine not to have for an existing project, but they're what make people choose other frameworks (such as Angular 2+) for new projects. Angular.js wouldn't have been as big as regular Angular is today if they'd have kept focusing on that - let alone as big as React.