[jazzypants]

I mean, there's a reason people made client-side frameworks in the first place. Distributed state synchronization is really, really hard to do manually.

I think HTMX is really well designed for what it is, but I struggle to think of an occasion when it would be the best option. If you have any amount of interactivity, you'll get better DX with a full client side framework. If you don't have much interactivity, then you don't even need a JavaScript library in the first place. Just write a static website.

[lunar_mycroft]

For the vast majority of web apps (including the ones that are built with SPA frameworks now), "how do I do distributed state synchronization" is an example of the XY problem. Most of the time, you don't actually need to write an entire separate app that understands your domain and synchronizes state with the backend, you need something that allows your users to trigger network requests and for the HTML displayed to them to be updated based on the response. Hypermedia is fully capable of solving that problem, completely sidestepping the need to solve the sort of state synchronization problem you mention.

[jazzypants]

If you display derivations of server-side state in more than one place on the client, you're synchronizing it.

If you're not displaying derivations of server-side state in more than one place on the client, then you don't need HTMX.

[htmXlabs]

The reasons however are not so valid anymore in 2026. Plain HTML has lots of extra features that did not exist in 2010 (form-validation and input-types, canvas, fetch, history-API), and some shortcomings have disappeared (like 'Flash of Unstyled Content'.)

Endless scrolling (made popular by Facebook/react) used to be heavy on the browser and sometimes made mobile devices unresponsive. That is not an issue anymore.

Tbh, I can't name a single issue we have today that requires large client-side frameworks for a fix.

[cies]

I use it in one place, where it makes sense: i want the server to template something that works interactively/asyncly. The rest of my current app is, thank God, oldskool SSR HTML request-response over an SQL db.