> But I don't envy people who come into the React ecosystem today as their first experience with large-scale front-end development.
Totally agree. Doing anything large-scale is hard, and comes with a massive learning curve. No React or Angular can save you from learning what it means to go from "hello world" to working on a project with a team of, say, 10 people.
What if it can't? (I don't develop apps using Angular, so I really don't know the answer...)
Then it's just a con for Angular, but also a pro for providing a default MVC architecture to rely on. It's a design choice that can be both good and bad.
Handlebars doesn't, but HTMLBars does indeed [generate][1] DOM objects from Handlebars AST - it's basically another compile step. Check out section 2 and 3.
Totally agree. Doing anything large-scale is hard, and comes with a massive learning curve. No React or Angular can save you from learning what it means to go from "hello world" to working on a project with a team of, say, 10 people.