Angular does have its annoyances and compromises, and in some areas, it's kind of a pig (i.e., ng-repeat).
Our projects aren't massive in scope (they're targeted towards small enterprise implementations), however, so I don't think Angular's limitations will really hit us hard except in certain use cases.
It's when you get controllers such as ng-repeat that Angular's digest cycle makes some difference. But ultimately you could write a component like ng-repeat yourself. As for where you place the directives -- the tag name or attributes, inside the class -- who cares? Only the {{}} in the text nodes matters strongly.
As for alternatives, check out http://platform.qbix.com . It is compatible with angular, ember, jquery etc. But it is much more straightforward, like react. You only have two concepts - pages and tools (components). And you can not only re-use a whole lot of tools from a marketplace but they all can work with a standard opensource platform of user accounts, realtime streams of data, which can distribute the social layer the same way bitcoin distributes money and contracts.
It was clear to us from day one that performance would be an area of concern, as well as the overall complexity of the framework. But those can be addressed. I don't agree that using another framework would magically prevent developers from thinking about performance issues. And many modules of angular we just don't use, and it doesn't impose those on us.
On a regular basis we re-evaluate alternatives: React, knockout, backbone, and so on. I expect those might involve tradeoffs that end up being positive or neutral for us, even it just forces a re-thinking of the app architecture. But this article doesn't make any recommendation or even mention the initial problem of rich, single-page apps that create user interactivity without page reloads. And the painting of the framework as Java and Enterprise do not match our experience or use case. I'm the first in line for recommendations on how we can improve what we do, but my impression is his bias is throw away frameworks and bring back our mass of raw javascript.