You can achieve a great deal of interactivity with pure get/post requests, along with a sprinkling of javascript one-liners and maybe alpine.js if client interactivity is important.

Yes, but doing with just HTMX, a framework we're talking in this thread, would be very painful.

Every project I started with alpine.js eventually transitioned to something heavier because it was hard to maintain once you're having something more interactive than an accordion or sliding drawer.

It's just not. I have done all these things. Maintenance is a piece of cake. Sorry that you struggled with this.

Well agree to disagree. To me, it felt like HTMX was a wrong tool for anything other than pure server side representation (i.e. a little bit more advanced than refreshing entire page on new data).

I guess it's easier if you move all client logic to server, but I didn't want backend to know about web representation details.