i havent tried the combination - perhaps this is the thing ive been missing. any recommended intro/resource for alpine + htmx that we can browse?

Google for AHA stack. (Astro, HTMX, Alpine) There was a great site by Flavio Copes that went into a lot of detail on using them together but it looks like it’s gone.

Dropped it a couple days ago to revisit it as a blog post, good timing I guess. Restored https://ahastack.dev/

It's pretty good combo. I use Alpinejs for the client side interactivty such as modals, but then use htmx for as much as I can that interacts with the backend.

You could be using only htmx or only alpine but the combo is really nice