We don't live in a world where every dev can choose the technology they work on.
Most of the time it is dictated by the whims of corporate(by making frameworks/tools as part of a job requirement) or by the mob(teams need to collective decide what technology to use).
They don't care about React or htmx. They just want something that fixes the problem.
This is actually very freeing: meet a real need and you don't have to believe that software development consists on running on a treadmill of constant changes for their own sake. Just do the job competently.