I think the fundamental misunderstanding (for the majority of devs who dont "get hotwire") is that you can very often delegate the statefulness of a given interaction to A: The Server via the database or B: The Browser via localstorage.

If your page can be written with it's state being "reasonably" delegated to one of these two, hotwire is _all you need_. (To be clear, it's more common that you're just doing a bunch of work to duplicate state that already exists in the database/on the server, or handled natively by the browser, and by "delegate" I mean don't-duplicate-for-no-good-reason.)

There are many (but fewer than those who "don't get" hotwire believe) cases where it's more of a headache to delegate state to A or B. In which case you should absolutely pull in react/vue/<insert_js_framework>/etc. My go-to is: https://github.com/skryukov/turbo-mount + react because it minimizes it's footprint on the "omakase-ness" of your rails app.