Just look at Wordpress for the demand for shoehorning things into something because it seems easier on the surface and accessible without learning harder programming stuff, or at least investing in the initial overhead.
There will always be demand. It's likely very practical for certain usecases but that won't stop people from abusing it in full SaaS web apps before some CTO joins and has to abandon it all when requirements evolve. Although I've seen some highly capable apps built on top of jquery plugins like Select2, which were extended well beyond their initial intent. Things that work is all that matters at the end of the day when it comes to making $$$.
Wordpress is a platform or framework, HTMX is neither. If you don't like what HTMX offers for your next feature... just don't use HTMX attributes on those elements. So comparing it to WordPress, or React, etc. is not accurate.
If you think this analogy is about frameworks vs libraries you missed the point.
It's the exact sort of technology option that is simple and accessible on the surface which is why someone inexperienced would adopt it in the early days. Then requirements naturally evolve and it gets shoehorned into ever more complex situations it was never intended for.
I'm speaking from experience and anyone who has worked in web app dev / JS for any length of time can see this coming from a mile away. The mountain of jQuery libraries alone should be enough but in the history of the internet WordPress is the classic cliché example of a simple technology that frequently gets abused beyond its original design. If your project is small and niche then obviously this critique isn't relevant. Nor is it dismissing the utility of htmx.
There is nothing wrong with offering simple solutions.
The problem with WordPress is that you can't just stop using it and painlessly swap to a more powerful framework/platform. You can really dig yourself into a hole.
You must not work on frontend because I've seen plenty of "simple" libraries exactly like htmx adopted and turned into monsters that power entire SaaS products the same way WordPress is turned into pseudo custom Web apps by non-programmers countess times.
Being the guy who has to decipher it is not a fun job and gives you perspective on early technology choices.
I've read enough discourse on HN re htmx to recognize people seeing it as an adequate solution for serious business usecases because they don't grasp the natural evolution in demands for complexity and interactivity in browser UIs.
People love downplaying why more serious JS frameworks are adopted in the first place then find themselves in situations that need it but try to pretend they can just force it on primitive "simple" libraries, as we saw with jquery ad nauseam. Or more likely they leave their mess for the next developer to do the job properly from scratch.
Every framework or library can be abused, but as a fellow software janitor I feel much better if the mess consists of just HTML templates and endpoints, rather than insane JS/TS/TSX build chains with invalid NPM dependency graphs (or a WordPress monstrosity).
One of the benefits of HTMX is that it doesn't add many abstractions, it primarily builds off existing ones. A HTMX dev must understand the basics of HTTP and the DOM, and not much else, to be functional.
You can say the same for the conversion between any 2 frontend frameworks, or even wordpress (you can just add another php file and do whatever next to your existing stuff), what's the special thing about htmx here?
There will always be demand. It's likely very practical for certain usecases but that won't stop people from abusing it in full SaaS web apps before some CTO joins and has to abandon it all when requirements evolve. Although I've seen some highly capable apps built on top of jquery plugins like Select2, which were extended well beyond their initial intent. Things that work is all that matters at the end of the day when it comes to making $$$.