This is exactly why I prefer Turbo ( https://turbo.hotwired.dev/ ).

Turbo comes from a progressive-enhancement philosophy: start with proper HTML and add richer behaviour on top. HTMX is a JavaScript library in much the same sense that React is. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it makes this anti-pattern easier to fall into.

Honestly, “the site should work without JavaScript” is no longer the strongest argument. Server-rendered, semantic HTML matters more for accessibility, SEO, and increasingly for LLMs and other automated tools.

Of course, you can write excellent HTML with HTMX. It just requires more discipline—or enough experience to recognize when you are quietly building a JavaScript application in HTML attributes.