I'm not talking in hypotheticals. No, if you do this for a Vue project that hasn't been touched in a few years, it doesn't work. Upon cloning the source, and running npm install, you'll run into loads of build errors between incompatible versions of npm dependencies, even after you've used nvm to switch back to an old version. A build process, especially one based on npm, intrinsically introduces great amounts of fragility to the project.
Yes, you pay for it by having to invent a lot of things yourself, but limiting the project to HTMX means you've just got one dependency to store and it'll work so long as you do that.
Back to the point of TFA: you can have a cold blooded project with a dependency to HTMX and one or two other JS libs. Once you introduce an npm build, you're squarely out of cold blooded territory due to the constant updates and maintenance required just to keep your build working.