From what I can see from the demo that's a super simple application. It might make sense to use a tool such as htmx/unpoly/hotwire/etc.
What I don't get is people just blindly "following the hype" (as with anything else) and assuming it's a replacement for client side frameworks (react, vue, etc) for anything you might need out there. You already said this several times in some Podcasts I listen to, so I don't blame you. But people are just "hey bro just use HTMX and Go and done". And that might be fine if you're a backend developer that doesn't like JavaScript and have a very simple use case and probably don't have high UX standards or picky designers chasing you with every animation, loading state or performance issue.
There are many projects out there with pretty complex UX logic where this will just not work, and if it works the end result is going to be much harder to maintain. Let's not take into account finding people willing to work with these tools (already happened to us where we had to move a Rails/Hotwire project to Rails/Inertia) because no one could work on the frontend, initially created by a backend dev and that became such a mess not even him could maintain it anymore).
But again, it is not the technology to blame (it's great!), it is the usage of it. And people can misuse anything, as they misuse react/vue/etc when they're building just a landing page.
You sound ~unhinged~ (edit: "unhappy" is more like what I was thinking; pardon the negativity) with this unprovoked rant about the reasons you assume people choose a technology.
It would be refreshing to me for someone to suggest we at least evaluate HTMX on a new project before going straight to the Next.js or Remix behemoths where we'll have 45min builds pulling in thousands of NPM dependencies over half a million files in node_modules.
Edit: I was also thinking it would be even more refreshing if people focused on web standards and asked whether or not they actually need a trendy framework.
> before going straight to the Next.js or Remix behemoths where we'll have 45min builds pulling in thousands of NPM dependencies over half a million files in node_modules.
You sound unhappy as well, and you also sound like you're doing something terribly wrong here.
My experience with people following the HTMX hype is backend developers annoyed by JavaScript not being perfect and node_modules size.
node_modules is never that big, and even if it is it's not a problem as big as maintaining complicated (i.e. not trivial) projects with these tools.
At the end of the day it depends mostly on your skills and the requirements for the project you're working on. As I said if you have some UX experience and you care about loading states, page transitions, animations and in general the little details then something built with these tools will be unmaintainable by anyone other than the person that implemented it in the first place.
node_modules too big? so what? that's not all of it shipped to the browser and I have plenty of space on my computer. A mess of html attributes, logic split between jquery, backend, html attributes, etc? Now that's a bigger problem.
And why I said "hype"? Well, because people suddenly see it as the greatest thing ever because some youtubers/podcasters made it popular, when there've been similar solutions for ages and nobody cared (i.e. Unpoly). But if the right youtuber talks about it, then boom! Everyone is saying everything should be done this way from now on.
As I said in another comment, the idea is great and I like it. But as the creator of the library said MANY times: It's not a replacement for component based frameworks. It's a great tool for the simpler use cases where react/vue/etc would be overkill.
My rant is about people acting as this is the future for everything, which again, the author of the library itself says it's not, and he's a smart guy.
Only backend developers like it. As soon as you have to do anything minimally complex it's just terrible.