Funny you mention that. Just today I was doing some research about Angular, Ember, Backbone, etc. The fundamental question I was trying to address was, why would one need a client-side MVC framework in the first place? After reading several lengthy articles, as well as looking at some documentation, I just couldn't grasp it. They all seem... off.
If something is called "framework", you can safely ignore it - it's clearly a pile of crap. If the thing is useful, it is called a library. As a corollary, if a language/programming paradigm requires frameworks to work, it's a failure right from the start.
The problem is that when you throw away all frameworks, you are not employable any more. And maybe that's the solution: find profession where you won't waste your life fighting next fad (which is different every year).
Try to imagine a larger project, an entire site running client side with just API end points on the server. Each framework you mentioned has a different approach, but they all try and tackle the task of organizing the heavy client side setup. If you did that project without those frameworks, you would end up writing most of a framework of your own.
You get a cute spinner animation instead of a blinking page. Thick client is coming back. Also JS developers are cheaper, although good ones are hard to find, because everyone likes server-side.
