> FWIW I have a potential solution: to show live data in my app I use an SSE stream of OOB swaps.

You might be interested in Datastar [1], which is like htmx but centered around Server-Sent Events. You don't have to do diffing yourself in application code because it's already handled by the framework under the hood through the "idiomorph" DOM morphing algorithm.

[1] https://data-star.dev/