> before going straight to the Next.js or Remix behemoths where we'll have 45min builds pulling in thousands of NPM dependencies over half a million files in node_modules.
You sound unhappy as well, and you also sound like you're doing something terribly wrong here.
My experience with people following the HTMX hype is backend developers annoyed by JavaScript not being perfect and node_modules size.
node_modules is never that big, and even if it is it's not a problem as big as maintaining complicated (i.e. not trivial) projects with these tools.
At the end of the day it depends mostly on your skills and the requirements for the project you're working on. As I said if you have some UX experience and you care about loading states, page transitions, animations and in general the little details then something built with these tools will be unmaintainable by anyone other than the person that implemented it in the first place.
node_modules too big? so what? that's not all of it shipped to the browser and I have plenty of space on my computer. A mess of html attributes, logic split between jquery, backend, html attributes, etc? Now that's a bigger problem.
And why I said "hype"? Well, because people suddenly see it as the greatest thing ever because some youtubers/podcasters made it popular, when there've been similar solutions for ages and nobody cared (i.e. Unpoly). But if the right youtuber talks about it, then boom! Everyone is saying everything should be done this way from now on.
As I said in another comment, the idea is great and I like it. But as the creator of the library said MANY times: It's not a replacement for component based frameworks. It's a great tool for the simpler use cases where react/vue/etc would be overkill.
My rant is about people acting as this is the future for everything, which again, the author of the library itself says it's not, and he's a smart guy.