The problem is that many people learning web development nowadays don't realise there is anything other than impressively complex client-side MVC frameworks. They are taught that traditional HTML pages are a dinosaur and doing progressive enhancement with some simple jQuery or vanilla JS is something for amateurs and old-timers.

I'm really pleased I was forced to learn the web in layers. I learnt basic HTML, then CSS came along. I realised I needed some dynamic behaviour so looked into CGI/Perl and later PHP. The DHTML became all the rage and I picked up a bit of javascript. PHP began to show it's weaknesses and luckily Django and Rails popped up. Ajax became a thing somewhere in all that and returning JSON instead of HTML snippets was sometimes useful.

If you start now and dive into learning Angular/React/Ember/Whatever - you are so insulated from the lower layers it must get a bit baffling trying to understand how all the parts fit together and why some things are done the way they are.

tl;dr - Get off my lawn.

Probably not. My point is that what (I'm assuming) is a brand new site is not built using the latest version. I would have thought that an organization such as Alphabet would want to dog food as much as possible and in doing so tell the world that 'Hey, look at this! It's super easy and pretty! You can have a site like this too if you adopt our technology'. Instead, it suggests to me that the barrier to learning the new shiny is big enough that whoever made it didn't want to learn it. That raises the question, should I learn it? Why, if even people at Alphabet don't want to? Do they doubt the long term prospects for Angular 2 so much that they hesitate in adopting it? Do they not consider it mature enough? TL;DR I read too much into things.