[0] https://htmx.org
I think it's quite natural for there to be large gaps in functionality provided: it looks like a rather young and unpopular project, so the additional code needed to handle more situations from within the language still needs to get written. jQuery also didn't have a whole universe of plugins from day 1, but was useful enough anyway. Not saying this project has a chance to become another jquery, just that it too can be useful even in a far-from-complete state.
[1] https://github.com/bigskysoftware/_hyperscript/blob/master/s...
Wrt. formatting the response, I'm experimenting with a hyperscript template language [1]. However, we don't yet have a design for imperatively building DOM trees (other than just doing it the same way you would in JS).