People don't realize that many of the dev tools they use they are using more because of the large marketing reach of those dev tools than any objective decision to use the tool.
Entire companies have been built around the premise of good developer marketing, and if you're faang, you simply get to impose whatever developer trends you want to see in the market.
I'll never forget how wildly popular Stripe became overnight because of how easy their SDK's were - people were happy to give them a higher % of each transaction (all the stripe competitors at the time were cheaper -- this isn't true anymore, but was at the time). It always blew my mind that people were so willing to give up a % of each transaction to save an extra couple days of development.
Developers in general are notoriously susceptible to marketing trends and if you're building a dev tool that you want to gain traction you absolutely have to play that game.
I am not saying HTMX is terrible or anything. What you've built is cool and I've built something with it. The point I was making wasn't made very well. What I meant was good options are often left out of the conversation because of React, Vue and for a while there, Svelte. There are a lot of great libraries and frameworks that nobody talks about, HTMX included. I just feel like HTMX isn't being hyped because it's good, but because of the memes/marketing aspect. I think it's a disservice to your work, which deserves to be assessed on its merits. It's a sad indictment on front-end that building something good is no longer good enough to get recognition.
but the reality is that marketing is what gets people to that content. I tried for years to convince people on pure technical merit alone, and only made halting progress.
i also got very lucky that a few things all came together at once:
* the primeagen & fireship_dev both covered htmx
* we released our book
* the twitter algorithm changed to boost funny stuff/memes
