I'm not sure what an appropriate payroll is for the Angels, but most of the teams in MLB have never spent $183M on payroll. That seems like a strange criticism of Moreno. He certainly hasn't been afraid to hand out large contracts. The problem is most of those quickly went south and became huge burdens on the team. You could say he hasn't spent a lot of money beyond the highest paid 3-4 players on the roster, but if those contracts are dead weight, I'm not sure trying to outspend the mistakes is a good way to build a team. A market like Anaheim's should be able to eat bad contracts and win with enough cost controlled talent, but that's their larger problem – any good players they've developed are few and far between.
Good point about Most Teams. But if you only pick teams in Top 5 media markets does that ratio change?
These are both good points. Just in terms of total payroll as a blunt measure, the Angels have been Top 11 (as high as 4th, often 6th or 7th) every year since 2003.
I also think "Top 5 Media Markets" is a little deceptive. The Angels are the Clippers of the two LA baseball franchises. Like the Mets and White Sox, they're the second banana in a Top 5 market. Looking at payrolls in recent years, the White Sox have a number of years where they were in the 20s in team payroll (29th in MLB in 2018, only ahead of the A's, somehow). And from 2014-16 the troubled Wilpon Mets were also ~20th in team payroll.
So, relatively speaking, the Angels have spent more than the teams I consider their "peers" in recent years.
As for how they've spent,
@cannonball 1729 could probably summarize better than I, but of course the franchise has been sort of cursed. A top pitching prospect was killed by a drunk driver on the way home from the stadium, another one died of an opioid overdose amid a team training staff scandal, and the well documented failures of their big contract free agents, from Pujols to Josh Hamilton. All of this despite employing perhaps the league's two standout generational superstars in recent years.
Don't have an opinion about Arte Moreno himself, although (at the risk of some light V&N posting) I find his Trump political endorsements hideous.