I developed almost exclusively in django for many years before moving to react or vue for frontends.
The switch from django templates was painful and a tremendous learning curve, so I get the value proposition of drop-in interactivity tools like HTMx. But when you compare the two frontend ecosystems (javascript vs htmx) it's night and day. The support, the DX tooling, the variety of libraries... that's not to say HTMx couldn't one day mature to a comparable place, but it seems unlikely, and in the meantime investing in "eating the elephant" by learning a JS framework seems worthwhile for anyone planning to spend a significant amount of time building frontends
Back when I was learning AngularJS (the 1.x days) I spent what felt like hours staring at some code wondering why the hell it wasn't working.
I eventually realized I had a typo in a template that was all too easy to overlook. Since there wasn't any tooling to catch it, it behaved like an html attribute and did nothing.
I seriously don't know that I would want to go back to such an anemic dev experience unless it is for a toy project.
Preact / React + TypeScript largely does away with this. For most of my projects, fixing the compiler errors means the UI largely works (other than plain logic errors). I did AngularJS, too, and it's a totally different, terrible ballgame. I recommend giving Preact a try.
The switch from django templates was painful and a tremendous learning curve, so I get the value proposition of drop-in interactivity tools like HTMx. But when you compare the two frontend ecosystems (javascript vs htmx) it's night and day. The support, the DX tooling, the variety of libraries... that's not to say HTMx couldn't one day mature to a comparable place, but it seems unlikely, and in the meantime investing in "eating the elephant" by learning a JS framework seems worthwhile for anyone planning to spend a significant amount of time building frontends