I think they're overlooking a very big issue which is trying to do any sort of business logic in a markup language is terrible. HTML is good for presentation, trying to embed logic like retrying requests in it can lead to weird code. The reason people like Javascript is having a fully C-style language for things makes logic easier to read and maintain.
Agreed. Judging from this example: https://github.com/rajasegar/htmx-trello which uses htmx in pug templates combined with hyperscript the results are... dubious and hardly scalable.
