HTMX pulls text from your backend, so normally folks serve HTML snippets... but you could have a bit of js that takes JSON and turns it into HTML in the browser, and HTMX will pull the JSON (or any other text) into the browser, so you could still use it with a JSON api, if you wanted to
I use DRFs renderrers so my Django backend can render either JSON or HTML, so my API is still "restful", it just serves HTML to clients that request HTML like browsers with HTMX and JSON to other clients that request JSON.
interesting,using DRF for json and Django for html at the same time for browser and nonbroswer clients.
my use case is embedded systems that can typically do client side rendering in browsers, the only server side rendering I can afford is some simple lua or c/c++ mvc alike backend,Django is too 'fat' on resources. there are some of them but none that is great and actively maintained as far as I know.
I use DRFs renderrers so my Django backend can render either JSON or HTML, so my API is still "restful", it just serves HTML to clients that request HTML like browsers with HTMX and JSON to other clients that request JSON.