The author is surprised that angular is holding up. I've been learning angular2 the past few weeks after having never used a single page application framework before and I'm loving every second of it. I'm never going back to ASP.NET MVC except to use it as an API.
Quite often ASP.NET MVC is/was taught with the Razor view syntax wrapped around the axle of everything else that MVC can do, because it was such a revelation compared to the suck of WebForms.