I fully agree with you. I'm a fan of htmx, can recommend it and have used it in some projects by now. But...
For one, htmx is not a full solution to avoid JS. It's excellent for the parts that are AJAX/CRUD, which certainly covers a lot of ground. You still need something more if you're doing stuff that doesn't fit here like interactive visualizations and many other use cases. However, it integrates very well with other lightweight libraries.
Secondly, htmx is great if you're developing full-stack (like GP). Meaning you touch every part of a site from the data model to coordinating messages to the frontend etc. If you want a much clearer separation between frontend and backend of a site, especially in terms of contributors/teams, then it might not be the right tool. IMO there are plenty of good reasons to do either.
Third, and this is a bit of a combination of the first two points, if you directly fetch data from a third party, say a JSON API, then htmx doesn't help you at all.
So really as you said, there is no one right way. For me it has been working very well though. People should look into it for sure though. There's an opportunity to combine htmx with orthogonal libraries that do the dynamic parts like lit etc.
For one, htmx is not a full solution to avoid JS. It's excellent for the parts that are AJAX/CRUD, which certainly covers a lot of ground. You still need something more if you're doing stuff that doesn't fit here like interactive visualizations and many other use cases. However, it integrates very well with other lightweight libraries.
Secondly, htmx is great if you're developing full-stack (like GP). Meaning you touch every part of a site from the data model to coordinating messages to the frontend etc. If you want a much clearer separation between frontend and backend of a site, especially in terms of contributors/teams, then it might not be the right tool. IMO there are plenty of good reasons to do either.
Third, and this is a bit of a combination of the first two points, if you directly fetch data from a third party, say a JSON API, then htmx doesn't help you at all.
So really as you said, there is no one right way. For me it has been working very well though. People should look into it for sure though. There's an opportunity to combine htmx with orthogonal libraries that do the dynamic parts like lit etc.