HTMX veering into SPA territory will produce the same kind of code we got when jQuery did it. The apps would work but they would be wholly unmaintainable. HTMX evangelists will just say "See? It CAN do it.", completely disregarding the ergonomics as if they're irrelevant in software development.

HTMX beautifully captures the zone between static and SPA, but devs already seem to want to use the hammer for everything, because all SPAs are suddenly not true SPAs. Well it was similar with jQuery too. The apps were considered to not be complex enough for a different tech stack, but eventually many apps grew more complex in their requirements and there is no sane way to move from jQuery to Angular and those projects got left in the dust.

> but eventually many apps grew more complex

But the counter argument is also valid; if your app did not grow complex, then you paid an upfront price for that expected growth but didn't reap the rewards.

Much simpler backends for example. htmx is cool, but it seems simple because it's simply pushing the complexity elsewhere.