I've successfully used this pattern (HTMX hypermedia style) to create an offline-first web app SPA[^1]. One of the pages is pretty dynamic and I wasn't sure if I would need a traditional front end library to work with it. But, nope, hypermedia to the win, it worked fine without a front end framework.

To build it I used my own library called HTMF[^2]. I started out using mpa-enhancer[^3] but found that that pattern is a little to janky sometimes. I think reloading a page every time on every interaction uses too many resources for a browser especially when you use a phone that doesn't have as much power as a laptop.

But overall I find the pattern very easy to use and keeps the complexity down.

I think some of the issues with traditional SPAs is that they have a lot of state and state is nonlinear in complexity. But using templating systems makes the complexity more linear in nature.

Also, I find libraries like React to be overly complex for what it does, see above. The way React works is just odd and counter intuitive. All for problems that are easy to solve. I do think there are places for a React-like library is needed but those are for websites that are inherently highly state-based. But most websites aren't state-based even ones that appear to be state-based at first.

The websites I work on are usually just forms and forms are pretty powerful and can get you a long ways before you need to go outside of that paradigm.

[^1]: https://github.com/jon49/Soccer

[^2]: https://github.com/jon49/htmf

[^3]: https://github.com/jon49/mpa-enhancer