Signals Are a Better Default Than More Machinery

When an Angular feature is mostly local to a screen, signals are often enough.

That does not mean every application should stay tiny forever. It means the burden of proof should be on adding more machinery, not on keeping local state small, explicit, and close to the component that owns it.

What signals do well

Signals make a few common tasks pleasantly direct:

• storing local UI state
• computing derived values
• keeping templates readable
• making updates explicit with set() and update()

The biggest win is not novelty. It is legibility.

What to avoid

It is easy to recreate old indirection with new primitives. A signal-heavy architecture can still become hard to reason about if every value is pushed through layers of helpers before the template sees it.

The better default is:

1. keep state near where it is used
2. derive values with computed()
3. move logic to services only when ownership is clearly shared

That keeps the codebase calm for longer.