[alethiophile]

Personally, I would say that if you are doing DOM updates via AJAX calls that return HTML, HTMX is just the correct way to do it. (Unless you're using some other solution already for other reasons and it also includes that functionality.)

Sure, you could do the basics of that workflow with twenty lines of your own JS, and save a dependency. But that's the kind of thing that is generally very unscalable, because unless you're very disciplined it quickly becomes a mass of spaghetti. The virtue of HTMX is more in how it channels and limits your code, than in the new capabilities it grants you (which were all in common use as of 2005 or whatever).