Every plane (except a few, most notably the Airbus) has an "AOA gauge" -- the yoke or stick. Until you get to a deep stall, that relationship between stick position and AOA is very direct.

I still rely on buffet to indicate a stall, but many planes don't give you much buffet. Many swept-wing transport aircraft will just have a hard time keeping the wings level during a stall, but won't give typical GA-like buffet, and just about all jets rely on artificial feedback/feel -- the loss of which is one reason a DC-10 crashed at O'Hare on takeoff in May 1979. Here's an interesting case of USAF test pilots (who knew they were going to be flying in a slow-speed regime that day) stalling a plane for thousands of feet before they realized it: Cargo Jet Nearly Fell During Test - Chicago Tribune

The A-10 has a straight wing, but had very little change in buffet when you exceeded the critical AOA -- the nose track just abruptly slowed way down, which was easy to tell and self-critiquing during BFM.

I think if the pilot of AF447 had a better understanding of why planes stall and how to recover, he wouldn't have been pulling back on the stick the whole time as he descended 35,000 ft to the ocean. If he had trained with an AOA gauge early in his career, it may have cemented the relationship enough for him to have known what he was actually doing.