For what it's worth, I mentioned HTMX to a Ruby developer friend, and his reaction was "oh, like Turbolinks", so I think the mindshare was probably there first. That having been said, HTMX is my preferred way of making dynamic frontends now. I've never been a React developer, but I've always found SPAs way, way overused.
Yeah, Turbolinks was huge throughout the Rails era—I remember it even being part of the random beginner tutorials that I did back in the day. I only ever heard of intercooler.js after htmx was announced.
That said, I'm not particularly interested in litigating who inspired who. Both libraries are neat and have developed in parallel for ten years. That's cool!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40555941
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577169