- The Angular dependency injection stuff seemed rather complicated compared with React pragmatism. Using React became heavier by the time Redux and other boilerplatish practices became widespread, but React had already gained adoption by then, and you could still get into it on tiny projects without fancy state management.
- The VDOM had articles saying how much faster it was than everything else, so it gained a reputation for speed compared with the other client-side templating alternatives at the time. Angular 1 had a reputation for being slow due to scanning all state variables on every refresh. Really React wasn't fast at everything, but fast at enough things to get that reputation. People who really understood DOM differential updates already knew how to do it faster than VDOM, either by hand or with smarter differential template compilers, but implementations weren't common. Marko and Svelte came along later.
- After years of being trained that separating HTML templates and code was the right thing to do for better engineering, preferably in separate files, it turns out that was annoying and lots of people really liked inlining the dynamic parts of HTML directly into code.
- The Angular dependency injection stuff seemed rather complicated compared with React pragmatism. Using React became heavier by the time Redux and other boilerplatish practices became widespread, but React had already gained adoption by then, and you could still get into it on tiny projects without fancy state management.
- The VDOM had articles saying how much faster it was than everything else, so it gained a reputation for speed compared with the other client-side templating alternatives at the time. Angular 1 had a reputation for being slow due to scanning all state variables on every refresh. Really React wasn't fast at everything, but fast at enough things to get that reputation. People who really understood DOM differential updates already knew how to do it faster than VDOM, either by hand or with smarter differential template compilers, but implementations weren't common. Marko and Svelte came along later.
- After years of being trained that separating HTML templates and code was the right thing to do for better engineering, preferably in separate files, it turns out that was annoying and lots of people really liked inlining the dynamic parts of HTML directly into code.