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