React was actually pretty simple in the early days. It's gotten significantly more complex because of hooks, suspense, SSR, and other features they've introduced more recently. But I would still take modern React over AngularJS 1 and I think it's far more explicit.
The source code for hooks when they were initially released was actually really straightforward too. It's been many years since I've read through other parts of the source code though.
All framework code has magic in it. But I posit that React uses magic internally so that we can write magic-free code. It's like how the Rust compiler contains unsafe code.
React was actually pretty simple in the early days. It's gotten significantly more complex because of hooks, suspense, SSR, and other features they've introduced more recently. But I would still take modern React over AngularJS 1 and I think it's far more explicit.