The reason for the phenomenon is simply because that's not how things operate.
If you're interested in delving into the inner workings of AngularJS, you can explore the source code responsible for parsing scopes for directives at this location: https://github.com/angular/angular.js/blob/master/src/ng/compile.js#L829
function parseIsolateBindings(scope, directiveName, isController) {
var LOCAL_REGEXP = /^\s*([@&]|=(\*?))(\??)\s*(\w*)\s*$/;
var bindings = {};
forEach(scope, function(definition, scopeName) {
var match = definition.match(LOCAL_REGEXP);
if (!match) {
throw $compileMinErr('iscp',
"Invalid {3} for directive '{0}'." +
" Definition: {... {1}: '{2}' ...}",
directiveName, scopeName, definition,
(isController ? "controller bindings definition" :
"isolate scope definition"));
}
bindings[scopeName] = {
mode: match[1][0],
collection: match[2] === '*',
optional: match[3] === '?',
attrName: match[4] || scopeName
};
});
return bindings;
}
This function performs a one-time scan through the object properties of the scope
, rather than recursively iterating through nested objects.