I remember the issue to be also that managing UI state on the server side was a load issue that many places didn’t want to deal with (e.g. Wicket, etc). The vibe at the time JS client apps came out in my circles was "thank God we can get rid of this UI stuff."

That’s still an issue I have with HTMX, but I understand for simple use cases it’s fine. I’d rather use HTMX than JQuery that’s for sure.