Full stack dev here. I know plenty of frontend JS. I've written a chat application for my job that's currently in use by ~thousands of people among other things

Full stack dev here. I know plenty of frontend JS. I've written a chat application for my job that's currently in use by ~thousands of people among other things. This preface just to note that I'm not bad at JS or scared by it. I hate having to set up a "modern" js toolchain when starting a new project. No matter what tools you choose it's always a huge hassle, and it never manages to integrate seamlessly with the backend. What I like about HTMx and alpine.js is that first of all the set up is trivial. I just stick the js files in my static folder and stick a script tag in the header. Secondly they leverage exactly what the backend is good at: producing HTML. Getting the backend and frontend talking is trivial instead of a huge REST-y kludge. With modern JS I need to write database models, REST views, REST serializers, components, routing logic, etc. with HTMx and alpine I still need to write database models, views and templates but I get to fully skip the whole translation to and from REST (or whichever other API model you prefer). And in the end it's no less performant. So yeah for hobby projects I definitely avoid modern JS, but it's not for no reason. The developer experience is just awful IMO.