I've been following projects like Hotwire and HTMX for awhile now, and I haven't seen anyone argue that scraping is a major reason to adopt this approach. I also don't see a lot of opposition to the idea of incorporating something like alpine to add some UI niceness.

What you see as a "terrifying" disregard for "two decades of advancements", others see as a liberating departure from two decades of unnecessary bloat. It's healthy to have more than one strategy available for building web applications.