It's not HTMX (well kinda, see below). It's devs being like "These bugs aren't my fault until you prove they are."

And it's abstraction. I understand WHY we do it... I guess. I don't AGREE, and this is why. If you're playing with code that generates code that you don't understand and then can't debug... I've always preferred to write the code that's going to run. Don't give me APIs that interact with database, let me write SQL. Don't give me something with a "simple syntax" that behind the scenes generates a bunch of JavaScript doing who knows what that no one on the team understands (HTMX), it's gonna be easier on everybody to just write the JavaScript. The only reason the devs solved it was ChatGPT knew what they had missed... and I had to point them in that direction (I cut and pasted the errors into ChatGPT and then said "Guys, IDK what this means because I don't know anything about HTMX. Do YOU GUYS KNOW?")

I ended up spending hours of my life on some tech some hotshots wanted to use because it's the "new, sexy thing" and what I learned was "Oh, this is just abstracted syntax ontop of Ajax which is ALREADY abstracted syntax ontop of JavaScript." I find this annoying, not charming.