The way I see it, Google team pulls out Angular versions like rabbits from a magic hat. I don't know if they even give a shit about backward compatibility. I spent my winter vacation creating a state of the art web based image editor and I was forced to write it on ng4. I wished to write it on React, but the internship terms asked me otherwise. Even though what I am creating is great stuff and would be useful to those looking for an out of the box web based image editor component to be plugged into their ng4 / ng2 apps, but I wish I could make it work the same way with react apps. I guess I will have to rewrite everything for react.