> Or you use HTMX... and you still end up with just as many (partial) views, but now with so much implicit state that you're veering into write-only code.

You're overthinking htmx then. I do some fairly complex stuff with no extra partials. Trick is just always rerender and use hx-select and hx-target to slice out the bits you want to update on the current page.

Server always has authoritative state and code is dead simple to reason about.