I think he knows that. The comparison with jQuery comes from the fact it is a DOM replacement logic too.
Even if the syntax is way better, in the end, itβs still a way of working that scales badly, compared to components which embed their own logic.
htmx shines to add dynamic behaviour on some pages, but is not appropriate to replace a medium-sized SPA in my opinion.
Have you used htmx? Since it doesn't solve the same problem jquery did (UX for client side JS), the accusation is misplaced. htmx is (primarily) a way of avoiding writing JS by extending the server-side rendered html paradigm to partial pages instead of full page re-loads.