Thanks for the detailed reply. It's helpful to understand the difference between the two approaches at a high level.

You probably know this but for others who might read, HTMX has an alpine plugin which uses morph and persists client side state, including Alpine competent state: https://htmx.org/extensions/alpine-morph/

I also thought HTMX persisted some state on swapped elements, but it's possible that's only the html attributes. Can't seem to find details in the docs at the moment.