That's a shame, and bad use of htmx, these examples shouldn't be showcase examples.

It takes careful but not extraordinate thinking to think of ways to get consistent results with or without JavaScript turned on. Indeed, when a visitor hits a site for the first time they get the full response so everything for a graceful degradation should already be there to use. If I can figure it out, I'm sure big CS brains can.

Yes but for your own projects you could have a first page with a "no JS" div and attach a HTMX load request. That's how I did my first HTMX project and it works well informing you to turn on JS.