You can do that with HTMX through events and hx-trigger but it just sounds like HTMX isn't the right tool for what you're trying to do. I've seen a lot of instances of people trying to use HTMX to replace react/vue/etc. and not understanding that they're trying to solve for very different things.

HTMX highly encourages client side scripting for dynamic updates if that's what your UI needs. It's very pro-JavaScript even though a lot of people get confused and try to use it to fully replace JavaScript

I think web components would be an excellent pairing with htmx. You get some kind of component abstraction (admittedly janky in some ways, though libraries like lit or atomico make this much better). But crucially you get automatic upgrade/initialize behaviour whenever the browser encounters a custom element. So the backend can just send down the custom elements as plain html, you don't need to wire anything up, the browser will bring them to life.

That to me sounds external/additional to the idea of a component.

You can do the component side on your backend language of choice, and output html like htmx likes it, and it works (have done it in Python, for example).

It is extra work, but it works with a bit of programming.