I'm interested in why this would be an anti-pattern? What would the alternative be?

I'm not qualified to comment as I don't use the feature, but people in their Discord would be happy to explain/discuss - its a wonderful place for learning more about the web, backend architecture and more.

I'm also sure this has already been explained in comments to other posts here as well.

It hasn't. Also, I'm definitely not going into the Datastar Discord. The main guy gets incredibly agitated and starts calling you names if you don't agree with him about anything lol