HTML itself is declarative in nature. All frameworks should embrace this.
By looking at React docs, I can tell you from my experience that it'll be pain in the s to maintain a large scale React application.
AngularJs' declarative way gives an app maintainability and highly test-ability. These two things are not the luxury but a must have requirement for any large scale long-live application.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY&list=FLuFwYXJkbMi...
Of course you're free to agree or disagree with their argument, but I wouldn't assume they are just newbs who are unaware of standard best practices. They know the "rules" and are breaking them consciously.
2) React programs tend to be very "dearative" in my eyes. Any declarative language still needs abstraction facilities: ie functions.
3) you can trivially implement any "more declarative" model you want on top of React's stellar core.
4) all of the benefits of test ability from angular apply to react too
Sorry about typos, on phone
This is what you typically get at the end in an Angular app. You don't need to "figure out" things where they are and what they are, and what they do in DOM.
Show me this declarative thing in React.
And this is just one part of Angular.
And if you don't like html in js, you could always embed ClojureScript in ClojureScript :-):
Happy to answer questions.
http://benalpert.com/2013/06/09/using-react-to-speed-up-khan...
In short, it's simple (very little to learn) and very fast. One other big thing I love is that it encourages building reusable and composable components. Angular has a lot of the same structure, but if you end up building directives then you have to drop down to manual DOM manipulation again if you want speed.
