Is the difference between the number of dev dependencies for eg. VueJs (a JavaScript library for marshalling Json Ajax responses into UI) and Htmx (a JavaScript library for marshalling html Ajax responses into UI) meaningful?
There is a difference, but it's not an order of magnitude and neither is a true island.
Granted, deciding not to use JS on the server is reasonable in the context of this article, but for the client htmx is as much a js lib with (dev) dependencies as any other.
Except that htmx's recommended usage is as a single <script> injected directly into your HTML page, not as an npm dependency. So unless you are an htmx contributor you are not going to be installing the dev dependencies.
There is a difference, but it's not an order of magnitude and neither is a true island.
Granted, deciding not to use JS on the server is reasonable in the context of this article, but for the client htmx is as much a js lib with (dev) dependencies as any other.
https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/blob/master/package.j...
https://github.com/vuejs/core/blob/main/package.json