But not before Intercooler.js (the predecessor to HTMX) or Turbolinks (the predecessor to Hotwire). This is an idea that has been developing for as long as the web itself, I don't think it's important to assign inventorship of the concept as a whole to any one project. They've all been learning from each other and innovating in their own ways.
It's not just that the idea has been developed over and over, but it is constantly hyped as a return to the golden past, and yet never gets the love that new client side spa messes end up attracting.
htmx was a mashup of $.load(), pjax and angular 1 style attributes (very different conceptual model but I saw how angular used custom attributes and thought that looked better than the JavaScript api I had cooked up)
later on I figured out that what I was doing was generalizing hypermedia controls, but that took me years to figure out.
