Definitely something better than HTMX is possible but to really reap the benefits of that approach you need an opinionated back end, probably more use of WebSockets, Phoenix is somewhat in that direction.
A lot of it is backlash against React and various things like Vue and Svelte that are pretty much the same. People haven’t really grokked how much the hassles of working with React have to do with its very success, it is just so easy to have a big app with 7 different widget sets to master and not just that, the conceptual simplicity of React makes it a leaky enough abstraction that you can never really count on just using a widget set and having it look good but you have to mess with the CSS not just to please clients, managers and customers but even yourself as there are always cases where the spacing of things is just terrible without getting deep into it. Since CSS is not really appropriate for programming in the large you will also wind up sucking in widgets that use things like Emotion which never let you forget about CSS but rather give you more complicated things to learn.
CSS is great until it isn't. The abstraction layer it provides is clever and useful, but also incomplete, opaque and so idiosyncratic that getting better at using and understanding it provides you with close to zero transferable skills (in our out).
Back in the 1990s developers were very happy with Visual Basic on Windows where everything was laid out by pixels which of course didn't make the most of every possible screen size but you could have a dev- and designer- UI builder that people understood. I've never seen devs or designers really be happy with any system for flexible layout.
A lot of it is backlash against React and various things like Vue and Svelte that are pretty much the same. People haven’t really grokked how much the hassles of working with React have to do with its very success, it is just so easy to have a big app with 7 different widget sets to master and not just that, the conceptual simplicity of React makes it a leaky enough abstraction that you can never really count on just using a widget set and having it look good but you have to mess with the CSS not just to please clients, managers and customers but even yourself as there are always cases where the spacing of things is just terrible without getting deep into it. Since CSS is not really appropriate for programming in the large you will also wind up sucking in widgets that use things like Emotion which never let you forget about CSS but rather give you more complicated things to learn.