The hoops people will jump through to avoid learning HTML/CSS/JS. I say this as a Python/Django dev who resisted learning web tech for 20 years: It's time to just learn this stuff. You can slap on a mound of band-aids and watch the wound bleed forever. Or, you can go in, get three stitches, suffer a little pain, and let the healing process begin.
I think this take does yourself a disservice: htmx is an extension of HTML and, in general, of the hypermedia model, and it is this model that should be contrasted with JSON data APIs.
I think that you should learn JavaScript, and I certainly think you should learn HTML(!!!) and CSS. But I also think you should consider how much more can be achieved in a pure hypermedia model with the (relatively small) extensions to HTML that htmx gives you.
Passive aggressively posting links to overlong tracts won't change my mind. I've read all of it and I fundamentally disagree with it. I'm happy to be done with this.. Unless, of course, you feel that you need the last word? Or, can we let this go and move on? Yeah?
Have I read what you’ve posted in this thread? Yes. And more when I was learning to use htmx. I gave it a good-faith effort and I’m completely unconvinced. If we were having this conversation ten years ago, I might be excited. Today, not so much.
The problem is that you don't "learn Javascript". The problem is that you need a whole ecosystem to do anything useful and that ecosystem is highly fractured and never seems to converge.
One of the bullet points was "They reduced their total JS dependencies by 96% (255 to 9)". That's an enormous support burden that simply vaporized.
'The problem is that you don't "learn (Python|Rust|Ruby|C++|Go)". The problem is that you need a whole ecosystem to do anything useful and that ecosystem is highly fractured and never seems to converge.'
My virtualenv has close to a hundred deps. Tried packaging anything in Python lately? How about type checking? It's the same everywhere, the grass just looks patchier when it's not a park you're used to going to.
There are over seven billion people on this planet, convergence of opinion is the exception.
The whole of the Django community has not converged on the same deps. Same with JavaScript. With Python/Django there's uWSGI vs. Gunicorn vs. etc, etc, etc. Then there's ASGI with Uvicorn vs. Daphne vs. Hypercorn. That's just running your code. Nothing is one-size fits all.