I think a better argument would have been not adding Angular to every project by default because it's the new hotness/shiny. There is a great use case for Angular but if all you need are some onclick's then yeah Angular is overkill and complicated. But if you need two-way binding and a semi-complicated UI then it simplifies a lot of stuff vs. straight up JQuery.
It's not quite there yet but it's getting better by the day. There are still some things like UI animations that are possible in Meteor but aren't quite as easy as they are in client side Javascript frameworks.
It makes me feel a little better though that they are trying to be transparent about the flaws by publishing their roadmap:
Had some traffic to my site from random places in the world (Brazil, Sweden, India) and had no clue where it was coming from until I saw this thread in my twitter feed. Mine is the Facebook Mutual Friends one.
You could also check out my slides from one of my d3 talks (with interactive examples):
I've been told by several of my mentors that there are precious few grey haired programmers (probably because of issues like the OP is pointing out) but seeing people like Jim Weirich (local Cincinnatian and inventor of Rake) who are still passionate about programming and going strong gives me hope that I won't burn out (I'm 34).
I mocked up a simple chart using d3 in tributary for our development team last week if anyone is interested in looking at it: http://tributary.io/inlet/4637557
I tried to add tons of comments explaining what's going on.