No, you misunderstand what is going on. htmx is an exercising in learning web development by someone who didn’t follow 2 decades of web development progress.
He is catching up though, now approaching the early 2010s jQuery (moxi) and backbonejs era with fixiproject.org
Htmx is a direct descendant of Intercooler.js, which has been around since circa 2013, more than a decade. Intercooler still exists and is used in production, and you can clearly see that it works almost exactly the same way as htmx does today, it just bundles jQuery together.
The creator has been working on these ideas for a long time, but the core idea–swapping HTML from the server into the DOM–has been constant throughout.
It's exactly because he followed the past two decades of web dev that htmx avoids almost everything about it. Fixi and htmx extensions follow the 80/20 principle and can work by just being dropped in with a script tag. You don't need an elaborate npm setup, same as everything else in the htmx ecosystem.
The creator is stuck in 2012 and so on as I said. If you look at project fixie, the reason htmx 4 exists, it shows how the 80/20 is an incomplete idea for something as general as a web framework. 80/20 might work for your specific use case, but as a general notion, it either gets built on reasonable constructs or grows into a Frankenstein. Htmx approach is a mirror of yaml in my ways. In denial of what it is trying to be and so turns into complete monster.
