It stands indeed for whatever, as in whatever works for you per Igor Minar from 2012 (emphasis mine):
MVC vs MVVM vs MVP. What a controversial topic that many developers
can spend hours and hours debating and arguing about.For several years +AngularJS was closer to MVC (or rather one of its
client-side variants), but over time and thanks to many refactorings
and api improvements, it’s now closer to MVVM – the $scope object
could be considered the ViewModel that is being decorated by a
function that we call a Controller.Being able to categorize a framework and put it into one of the MV*
buckets has some advantages. It can help developers get more
comfortable with its apis by making it easier to create a mental model
that represents the application that is being built with the
framework. It can also help to establish terminology that is used by
developers.Having said, I’d rather see developers build kick-ass apps that are
well-designed and follow separation of concerns, than see them waste
time arguing about MV* nonsense. And for this reason, I hereby declare
AngularJS to be MVW framework – Model-View-Whatever. Where Whatever
stands for “whatever works for you”.Angular gives you a lot of flexibility to nicely separate presentation
logic from business logic and presentation state. Please use it fuel
your productivity and application maintainability rather than heated
discussions about things that at the end of the day don’t matter that
much.