I think we fundamentally agree that we want to be careful about adding complexity to a project. Funnily enough there have been many times where I really thought Hotwire equivalent would have cut down a lot of complexity. I've also actively looked at web components at work and for hobby projects to see if we could make/keep things simpler.

But maybe I'm biased because I've been working with React for a long time, I don't find it too daunting to manage dev tools around React. When React was young, I remember that there were _a lot_ of ecosystem churn but now it's more-or-less settled and I don't think it's too bad.

I don't know how Hotwire works that well as most of my experience is around Elixir's LiveView, but at least for LiveView, there is also quite a bit going on under the hood to make it performant for large lists and to handle error states gracefully. And I (maybe incorrectly) assume Hotwire is similar, so I feel like it may not be not as simple as you say. (Edit: it is simpler than React though!)