Hotwire is just a name for a bunch of tech that has been around for a while. The components of Hotwire - Turbo and stimulus - have improved over time, for sure, but the core ideas haven't changed much, if at all. I worked on a hotwire side project recently and described it to a friend as "writing Rails like it was 2009." It feels really good because I've always found it hard to grok SPAs and the like, but could generate tolerable server-side generated webapps.

Old wine in a new bottle, basically.