Comment by zdragnar

Back when angularjs was first becoming popular and wide adoption of data- attributes through HTML 5 were being discovered, everyone and their dog wrote their own lightweight version of angularjs, which looks a lot like htmx / datastar.

They never really took off in large part because there wasn't good, performant support for MutationObserver, and thus few mechanisms for composability and live/ dynamic content.

With people remembering that not everything needs to be react or a single page app, it's nice to have something that sits in-between pure vanilla and something heavier.

We got out of the "framework of the week" mania years ago, but LLM use is making that make a bit of a comeback.