The beauty of it is that you don't _need_ Alpine at all, Alpine just comes up because it's popular, it solves the problem of lightweight inline scripting, and it integrates relatively seamlessly with htmx.
If you don't want to use Alpine for whatever reason, you can just write your own javascript, you can use hyperscript, you can use some other inline scripting library.
> when I need to work with json - since I don't control all backend and json isn't really a first class citizen of htmx
yeah, if you can't make the backend return HTML, you're in a worse off place if you want to use htmx.
There's extensions [1][2] for receiving and rendering JSON responses with htmx (though I haven't used them), but I totally understand it starting to feel like a worse fit.
I've shipped multiple projects running HTMX, and I generally like it.
Grain of salt too, I'm typically a "DevOps engineer", and I generally lean towards backend development. What I mean to say is that I don't know react and I don't want to.
My understanding of it is that HTMX is a library, whereas React is a framework. With a library, you need to figure out the structure yourself, and that sometimes makes things more difficult since it's another responsibility. This is likely where things fail for the large enterprise apps _not_ using a framework, since structuring the codebase for an enterprise application (and convincing your colleagues to like it) is genuinely difficult and there's no way around that.
> as some people have suggested - perhaps cynically - a simple lightweight replacement of jQuery?
I don't even see this as cynical, I think it's a relatively fair assessment. A key difference is that jQuery has it's own language to learn, whereas htmx is pretty much a few extra html tag attributes.
I'd recommend you just try HTMX out when you have an opportunity to write something small and full stack, you might like it a lot.