REST Explained

I think the term REST got co-opted because people just didn't want to actually use the Representational State Transfer. Its "Self Descriptive Messages" mix presentation with data in a way that strikes a lot of programmers as wrong.

They needed a name for the "right" thing, passing data around and then deciding how to present it. REST isn't correct, but the name was there -- and not really being used.

I don't entirely understand HTMX, but as far as I can tell it really does want to pass HTML around in something closer to the original REST spec. It just provide a lot of infrastructure required to make that work, unspecified in the original REST spec.