What you are missing is that the pitch is well-done and the audience seems to mostly ignore the web-native (or lighter alternatives than a full react framework approach).
HTMX is a wrapper around old functionality pitched to devs that learned that frontend "really, really needs" all the complexity. It's being used by people who never needed all that complexity for tasks that didn't need a whole frontend stack.
Of course it fits them better than the alternative that they have heard about being the only modern way to build apps (a massive frontend stack where the framework isn't even a framework anymore so we built another framework around it).
The thing that htmx users often miss is that you can have most of those nice things without pulling in htmx, htmx is definitely not right for most use-cases, htmx itself is quite the large JS dependency (and you still need to write JS to use it properly), it's not "just hypermedia", and on and on.
Personally I think the solution-space that HTMX fits in is extremely narrow between normal HTML/CSS/JS and "fuller" frontend apps (hopefully built on lighter stacks than the current react meta).
HTMX is a wrapper around old functionality pitched to devs that learned that frontend "really, really needs" all the complexity. It's being used by people who never needed all that complexity for tasks that didn't need a whole frontend stack.
Of course it fits them better than the alternative that they have heard about being the only modern way to build apps (a massive frontend stack where the framework isn't even a framework anymore so we built another framework around it).
The thing that htmx users often miss is that you can have most of those nice things without pulling in htmx, htmx is definitely not right for most use-cases, htmx itself is quite the large JS dependency (and you still need to write JS to use it properly), it's not "just hypermedia", and on and on.
Personally I think the solution-space that HTMX fits in is extremely narrow between normal HTML/CSS/JS and "fuller" frontend apps (hopefully built on lighter stacks than the current react meta).