Personally, I don't think the term "modern JavaScript" makes much sense - it's just a nice-sounding but mostly meaningless buzzword, but I can guess the reason

Personally, I don't think the term "modern JavaScript" makes much sense - it's just a nice-sounding but mostly meaningless buzzword, but I can guess the reason about the disagreement. Alpine and HTMX are entirely different architectural approach to script webpages, as compared to React/Vue/Svelte/Elm/... approach to build SPA webapps. And the latter approach was very frequently called "modern JavaScript" (and that's why I think it's more of a buzzword now, and less of an actually meaningful term).