If you have other footguns in mind, feel to shot me an email at jose dot valim on gmail!
I think you'll find that my argument ("LiveView shouldn't be the default way of doing things") is fairly common.
It's not necessarily about the footguns (or lack thereof), or improving the docs: it's about there being a shared vocabulary among people that do web development that LiveView is alien to.
Web frameworks have historically been great tools to drive adoption of programming languages (Ruby/Rails, react/ts). The same could be true of Elixir.
However, in order for that to obtain, the learning curve can't be too steep, at least in the initial portions of it. I think you'll find that with LV the learning curve looks like a step, and imho that step is a bit too high.
Of course, all these arguments apply both at the individual level and the company/org level. Think about a new hire's time-to-productivity if they first have to learn elixir, then phoenix + liveview vs just elixir & MVC phoenix.
If there's a way I could contribute to an effort that helps people learn elixir sans lv--perhaps writing, sketching, or even reading a guide/documentation--I'd be happy to give it a crack.
We should always improve the learning curve, regardless of its steepness! Any work in this direction is always welcome. I don't have anything in mind at the moment but if you do stumble upon anything, feel free to PR. :)
But what you wrote matches my understanding. I have some routes that are pure LiveView and some that go through controller routes with HTML, and it was clear to me where I needed auth when I made them.