My implementation is pretty vanilla AngularJS with ui-router. All I want is for a user to use forward and back browser buttons to navigate. It doesn't work. I can't find a solution through searching Google. What few blog posts and StackOverflow questions I can find are from 2013 and 2014.
I'm not going to spend a week figuring out how all the internals work so I can roll my own solution.
If going to spend a week on something, it will be working with React. And, I'll see where that goes.
This really shouldn't be hard to get working. Try downloading a sample/example project that has routing set up already then strip it down to the bare minimum. Throwing a whole framework away because you're maybe missing a line of code somewhere isn't going to set a good trend.