Why use terminal: true instead of removing lower priority directives?

Question

Related: How to understand the `terminal` of directive?

Why would someone set terminal: true and a priority on a directive rather than simply removing the lower prio

Answer 1

I believe terminal was created to work with directives that use transclusion or directives that are meant to replace all of an element's content.

If an element uses terminal then it does not want applicable directives to compile during the initial directive collection. The initial collection is triggered either by Angular's bootstrap process or a manual $compile. Just because the terminal directive does not want the lower priority directives to compile, does not mean that it does not want the directives to run later, which is why transclude is a perfect use case.

The contents are compiled and stored as a link function that can be evaluated against any scope at any time. This is how ngRepeat, and ngIf perform.

When writing a directive that uses transclusion maybe consider if it should use terminal as well.

I don't believe it's very useful when using it with directives that don't use transclude.