tl;dr

If we compare apples to apples: Angular

I am actually a senior developer that works with Angular and React for several years.

It gives me an deep insight into both technologies, what is unique. Because usually peofirstple work with one or the other making their opinions biased.

What people don't know about React and Angular is that they are two different products. React is a presentation library. While Angular is a framework.

There is a debate where is the line between a library and a framework. It is a fluid term and what doest makes me call Angular a framework is just that it takes care of more stuff than React.

It does not mean however that you can not create a framework with React. Surely you can, and it is what people do. There are in fact tens of tens of various frameworks built on top of React in a combination with other libraries. They shape something together that can be comparable to Angular.

However, if it comes to your question, people compare learning time for React and Angular without all other libraries that you have to learn when using React that form together something comparable to Angular.

That is the secret of why React is always rather ad the one that is easier and faster to learn than Angular. Pure marketing.

If we would just take the part of Angular that is handled by React, and learn only that part, I'd be brave enough to say Angular presentation part is easier to learn and can be learned faster than React.

There are two reasons that influence my opinion. First, Angular is based on OOP principles and Typescript. So of you happen to know OOP you already know 70% of Angular.

Second, React creators made a horrible mistake of dumping object oriented programming. As a result React with it's lovely but quacky replacement for component life cycle and necessity to wrap almost everything into hooks and useEffects is actually more complicated to learn.

I won't mention Redux (external necessity?) that is just a stone that drives React down while Angular built in services are easy to use and make functional programming a pleasure.

I could go for hours comparing these two birds…

I personally love both React and Angular. They chose two different paths and it is exciting to see how they evolve.

Dislaimer: This is a probono article. The author is not compensated for his work. All possible gains from you reading it go to dev.to owners.