This was almost exactly my first impression of HTMX as well. It's a huge step forward! However, for my tastes it demands too many tiny views and micromanaging, which somewhat felt like a drag on my productivity. For an alternative, take a look at Unpoly [1] which has more batteries included (i.e. create layers of interactivity that update lower layers automatically) and is centered around full page requests/diffs and less focused on injecting small page fragments everywhere. For my small apps, I could do everything in one view that took three or more views with HTMX. I can only imagine the views exploding for a modestly complex site. The biggest penalty for Unpoly is that it is quite a bit (~2X) slower than HTMX, which needs to be kept in mind and managed for larger pages with a lot of interactivity. I suspect this is because Unpoly loads the entire page and does a DOM diff to see what it needs to update, as opposed to injecting just a page fragment. In my tests, I was able to manage around this issue using layers. The big upside to Unpoly is that the full page refresh architecture aligns very neatly with Django's request/response cycle, which gives you pretty seamless interactivity and form validation. It also has a lot of batteries included that HTMX lacks. I think HTMX is terrific and revolutionary, but Unpoly fits my brain better while doing Django development.
