I finished a project last year where we used Angular 1 as the SPA framework. It worked very well for us, but we were taken aback when we found out that Angular 2 was not backwards compatible with Angular 1. In hindsight I think Google made the correct decision, but I am not sure I would have chosen Angular as our front end framework if I had known that ahead of time.
I think your friend's recommendation to learn React was a good choice, but I would keep in mind that React is really meant to be used with another framework like Flux or Redux. You can even use it with Angular 2 or Aurelia. You might also want to take a look at Vue.js.