[arcanemachiner]

Alpine is for client-powered reactivity and HTMX is for server-powered reactivity.

Think about pressing a button that opens a modal with content already delivered by the server (like a settings modal). You don't need to make a HTTP request for that, so you could use Alpine.

Let's say instead that you click a user icon and you want to render a modal that contains user info which hasn't been fetched from the server (because why waste resources loading all this data the user might not see or need?). When clicking that icon, you could use HTMX to fetch the user data from the server then display the resulting content in a modal.

Two different actions with similar visual results (from the user's perspective), but one is all client-side and one requires extra info from the server.

Alpine and HTMX are frequently confused this way, as they solve seemingly similar problems from different ends of the network.