But while first render is of course important, now everything else is more expensive with htmx because you have to generate HTML on the server, on top of your usual fetch pipeline. Yes, for small traffic it makes little difference, but once you have >10k/s requests, things start to cost.
HTMX tools are simpler while providing straightforward thinking around html fragment caching, whole page caching. React just gives a runaround way of doing everything. I'll remind you React was built so that people could continue watching a streamed video while they navigated on a page. Most pages aren't streaming anything.
But for more details, see the sibling comment:
What does React have to do with loading times of a page? React does not contribute to that at all other than having to download the JS runtime, which with Preact is 3KB.
> You cannot argue that React is extremely heavy and also adds a lot of time between first render
Yes you can! In no world would React itself add enough render time to make people navigate back, even if running on a computer from the 90s!