With HTMX 4.0 it might be a bit nicer. I use my own home-grown HTMZ-BE lib/snippet that has the back end decide where to place the elements. Deciding from the back end makes it so you go from a lot of eventing on the front end to middleware on the back end, which significantly reduces the complexity of the application. And then when you do have a lot of interactivity you just send down the whole interactive area and have morphdom (HTMX uses idiomorph, I believe) which will do a comparison of the DOM compared to what your new HTML is and update just what needs to be updated.

I've found that to really reduce the complexity of my applications. If I really do need something more powerful with state machine interaction, then I use VanJS. But, really, I've only used that for my static sites where I need a little interaction on the front end and no back end connection.

Here's an example of using HTMZ-BE (which can easily be extended to HTMX 4.0 and Data-Star - if you need even more features).

https://github.com/jon49/Soccer

It also uses an _<action> attribute pattern on the HTML for simple, declarative front end state interaction. Makes the user's life a little nicer.

It's amazing how simple things can be if you work with it and think about, "I want simplicity." A lot of the front end frameworks add a lot of complexity, even nice frameworks like Svelte, I think because the paradigm is just wrong.