When I first saw hyperscript in the HTMX docs (they're made by the same person), it also struck me as an unholy abomination. But in practice, it's been pretty nifty. It provides a concise way to perform common actions that adheres to the idea of locality of behavior that HTMX and Tailwind both offer as well. I still think I might come to regret it, but it doesn't seem like it would be hard to rip it out and replace it with plain JS. For example, I'm mostly using it to do stuff like:

on click toggle .hidden on .modal