Comment by recursivedoubts

Sounds like this app wasn't a good fit for htmx. I have added it to the "On The Other Hand" section on the htmx website:

https://htmx.org/essays/#on-the-other-hand

Regarding the default swap behavior of "innerHTML":

https://htmx.org/quirks/#the-default-swap-strategy-is-innerh...

Our proposal to merge htmx functionality into the HTML spec uses outerHTML:

https://alexanderpetros.com/triptych/

Also consider datastar, it was written from an SSE-first perspective by a go engineer:

https://data-star.dev/