> Google's absolutely insane "we're deprecating this, we'll have a replacement for it at... some point, good luck").

Angular 2 came out in 2016, without the two way binding design issues of AngularJS. Google ended support for AngularJS on Dec 31 2021, so there was 5 years of overlap between the two. They even had migration paths that allowed AngularJS and Angular 2 application code to live together from the initial release of Angular 2.