Hi,
> any suggestions on reliably recognizing cells within an Angular table
Unfortunately, Angular (like many other modern fancy frameworks) does not assume automated UI testing and thus (at least by default) does not provide unique and stable identifiers for its UI web elements. With no unique and stable web element identifiers provided, creation of fast, reliable and more or less readable test code is a kind of an art with implementation specific for any given tested application. So the only universal piece of advice that I can provide you with for Angular application is to examine it carefully in the Object Browser and try to figure out the ways of how to reliably identify web elements that you need to interact with in your test.
P.S. As Angular applications quite often have one or two root elements with IDs provided, I guess that in general it is possible to provide identifiers to web elements. What I don't know is why this is not done in the real projects. Either developers do not want to bother themselves with extra work or nobody just requires this until tests automation starts (and when it is too late).