Similar situation here, but it depends on your level of experience as well. Can you structure an AngularJS app so that it's (relatively) sane? Absolutely. It's also very easy to make a mess of things so that it's hard to reason about control flow; frameworks that are doing a better job of embracing unidirectional dataflow definitely help with this, but I don't blame Angular as it predates the wide adoption of that as a practice.
It's also more difficult to follow practices like quickly rendering above the fold content; when you use the normal practice of writing re-usable directives, you end up needing to wait until at least Angular and any dependencies are loaded prior to being able to render any content at all. Server side rendering of initial content helps to alleviate that quite a bit since even though the content may not be interactive until your app bootstraps, the perceived load time is much better as the user has something to look at.
Oh totally agree. There are some really nasty bugs we've had to deal with because of the lack of strictly controlled data flow. Still not all that bad.
It's also more difficult to follow practices like quickly rendering above the fold content; when you use the normal practice of writing re-usable directives, you end up needing to wait until at least Angular and any dependencies are loaded prior to being able to render any content at all. Server side rendering of initial content helps to alleviate that quite a bit since even though the content may not be interactive until your app bootstraps, the perceived load time is much better as the user has something to look at.