> I even eschewed HTMX. I bought the book! It's great, it made me feel hopeful, I want to use it someday. But I just ... didn't need it.

This is always true for any web project. HTMX is an abomination of opinions that are harmful to both small and large scale projects. It attempts to solve problems (poorly and naively) in the mid scale that almost nobody ever spends much time in. It's a toy for inexperienced managers to create bullshit maintenance work while they try to quickly jump to something else. We need to stop making crap like this and focus on coding according to web standards and sparingly add much better tools as the project scales up.