Because migrating to NextJS would have meant doing a rewrite of the entire backend which was already written in Python/Django and running in production. Migrating to htmx was much less risky.

NextJS can use an external API? It doesn't need to be fully full-stack.

So then add Next.js when we're already using another backend service. The idea is to reduce complexity, not the other way round.

I don't think the point here was to show how quickly they could migrate to another framework, but rather to show that HTMX is powerful enough to use for things like this.

The point seems to have been to show how you don't need to use React to build applications like this, so migrating to NextJS wouldn't have made any sense from that perspective.

That would make sense if this was a hobby project but it’s not.

Perhaps they are better equipped to write more Python, less JavaScript.