Comment by Wintamute

Every large opinionated framework is "overblown" (aka "scary") until you actually take the time to learn it and code a few large non-trivial projects with it. I've learnt more MVC frameworks than you can shake a stick at and Angular is hands down one of the best. Once you're comfortable with it you can fly and code things so quickly and cleanly, and it scales well into complex apps too. Angular is largely designed the way it is to promote small, encapsulated, testable components. But if you're not practising TDD, or don't test your code at all, (which I suspect is the case for many of the framework's detractors) then it possibly is somewhat over architected - by all means pick a simpler framework, but don't knock it from a position of ignorance.