Even with a clean slate, there's immense value in choosing something that you already know to be a tried-and-true approach - i.e. in choosing "boring" technology¹ instead of trying to be at the cutting edge.
Now if exploring the cutting edge is a goal of yours in and of itself, then by all means blow some of those innovation tokens on the new Reactangular.ts hotness. For a lot of projects, though, the goal is to get something out the door as painlessly as possible; jQuery and plain JS have (for better or worse) been the tried-and-true "boring" approaches, and HTMX (from what I can tell) seeks to be the similarly "boring" choice.
Obviously right now HTMX ain't the boring choice (because it's still pretty new), but a decade from now it could be. Having used it in a couple pet projects recently, it already does feel pretty boring (especially since it goes hand-in-hand with other boring strategies like "just use SQL" and "just use CGI scripts" / "just use classic MVC frameworks").
Now if exploring the cutting edge is a goal of yours in and of itself, then by all means blow some of those innovation tokens on the new Reactangular.ts hotness. For a lot of projects, though, the goal is to get something out the door as painlessly as possible; jQuery and plain JS have (for better or worse) been the tried-and-true "boring" approaches, and HTMX (from what I can tell) seeks to be the similarly "boring" choice.
Obviously right now HTMX ain't the boring choice (because it's still pretty new), but a decade from now it could be. Having used it in a couple pet projects recently, it already does feel pretty boring (especially since it goes hand-in-hand with other boring strategies like "just use SQL" and "just use CGI scripts" / "just use classic MVC frameworks").
----
¹ https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology