You must not work on frontend because I've seen plenty of "simple" libraries exactly like htmx adopted and turned into monsters that power entire SaaS products the same way WordPress is turned into pseudo custom Web apps by non-programmers countess times.
Being the guy who has to decipher it is not a fun job and gives you perspective on early technology choices.
I've read enough discourse on HN re htmx to recognize people seeing it as an adequate solution for serious business usecases because they don't grasp the natural evolution in demands for complexity and interactivity in browser UIs.
People love downplaying why more serious JS frameworks are adopted in the first place then find themselves in situations that need it but try to pretend they can just force it on primitive "simple" libraries, as we saw with jquery ad nauseam. Or more likely they leave their mess for the next developer to do the job properly from scratch.
Every framework or library can be abused, but as a fellow software janitor I feel much better if the mess consists of just HTML templates and endpoints, rather than insane JS/TS/TSX build chains with invalid NPM dependency graphs (or a WordPress monstrosity).
One of the benefits of HTMX is that it doesn't add many abstractions, it primarily builds off existing ones. A HTMX dev must understand the basics of HTTP and the DOM, and not much else, to be functional.
Being the guy who has to decipher it is not a fun job and gives you perspective on early technology choices.
I've read enough discourse on HN re htmx to recognize people seeing it as an adequate solution for serious business usecases because they don't grasp the natural evolution in demands for complexity and interactivity in browser UIs.
People love downplaying why more serious JS frameworks are adopted in the first place then find themselves in situations that need it but try to pretend they can just force it on primitive "simple" libraries, as we saw with jquery ad nauseam. Or more likely they leave their mess for the next developer to do the job properly from scratch.