I am not sure about it being dead. But I can give you my perspective.

I started front-end programming in 2016 when Angular2 was still in beta and they cautioned about breaking changes. So I considered React and Vue, and ended up using React not because I thought it was better than Vue, but I had deadlines and could easily ask my friends who were already using React about challenges I might face. At the time Angular2 documentation was limited to TypeScript and it added the friction of understanding a newer language (however similar to JS) before getting down to business.

I feel a lot of developers might have faced similar issues. React was already stable and used by so many developers. The easy availability, clear documentation and huge community support made it a winner for me.

I intend to give Vue and Angular 4 a try as well in the near future for some personal projects.

Angular is just getting better. Angular Dart just released 3.1.0 and the team started working on 4.0.0 at the beginning of the week. Angular2 stuff just continued to work in 3.0.0 as well as in 3.1.0. AngularJS was due for a rewrite.

In my opinion it was the only good decision by Google to develop Angular2.

My first aspect is business-wise:

AngularJS had so many flaws that it would be clear that it could not compete against other front-end frameworks like React and Vue - which both got popular pretty fast - in the long term.

At the same time AngularJS was pretty much getting a "standard requirement" in job ads for front-end developers just like jQuery (of course not to that extend). So people who make decisions about frameworks, hirings and stuff already do know about AngularJS.

For decision makers it takes some time to adopt to new technologies, so they would stick to something they know, in this case AngularJS. So even if Angular(2) is technically a complete different thing, it still has its brand value and is gonna be used and - in my opinion that's important - developers will want to use it since it's a good framework that tries to remove all the flaws of AngularJS.

Another aspect I see is that frameworks like Ionic2 and NativeScript, which both depend on Angular (if you don't decide against it), are pretty popular and make developers used to develop with Angular.