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.
This doesn't apply to HTMX.
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.
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.
I mean, you technically can, but for that amount of work and/or friction you can pretty much go between any 2 frameworks.
If you are refactoring everything because a small subset of features didn't fit the HTMX glove, that's an engineering management failure.
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.