Would you use an angular front end to consume an api call and display on a page? I have always used Ajax but told that is a dinosaur move.

that depends... if it's just for display and with no interaction with returned data - that's overkill. If you have pagination, sorting or client side searching - go for it.

But in the end - do whatever floats your boat :)

Do what you know. Ya, angular is a bit overkill for a simple fetch and display job. The trouble with a lot of the frameworks/libraries these days is that they come with more than just itself to learn. With React, a lot of people consider it best practice to also use webpack, redux, react-router, css-modules, etc. That may be the case, but I find it's much easier to learn things piece by piece. The more control you have over your stack, the less likely you'll want to rage quit.

Tell the kids and their bloated Angular downloads to fuck off.