IME a lot of the pain comes from picking the wrong tool for the layer.

By that I mean saying everything has to be a JS framework or everything has to be server-delivered-HTML.

For very dynamic & interactive things maybe it makes sense to write it just in JS without a framework?

For full pages for data-powered applications (that heavily benefit from types & Typescript), maybe it makes sense to use something like Golang on the server.

And then you can embed those interactive dynamic islands inside the data-intensive application, with a thin layer of communication between the two.

Just my 2c - I've found that pattern to be super compelling

I agree but the dominant view is that everything has to be a SPA and having some html delivered by the server is considered bad.

I agree. I really wanted to like it, I do think a lot of what it purports to try to do would be better for the web and development in general, but my experience is that HTMX (even with Alpine) fails to succeed in practice.

Use Alpine for dynamic client-side. Htmx is focused on talking with the server.

I should have clarified that yes, I used Alpine with htmx.