Last year I spent forty minutes setting up a React project for an internal admin dashboard. Just the boilerplate. Vite config, ESLint setup, Tailwind integration, React Router, TanStack Query because someone on Twitter said it was the right way to handle server state now. I hadn't written a single line of actual application logic yet and I already had twelve files open. The dashboard needed to list records from a database, let you filter them, and update a status field. Three things. That's it. I've been thinking about that moment a lot since then. Not because React was wrong exactly, but because the whole experience made me ask a question I probably should've asked earlier: what problem am I actually solving, and does my stack match that problem? HTMX has been around since 2020, technically. Carson Gross built it on older ideas — intercooler.js, hypermedia, REST as it was supposed to work.…