But it is simple :) The underlying technology might be more complex, but the library is solid, it's trivial to update any part of the page once you have the libraries set up, and you don't need to write any javascript. Works for me!
I think you may mean easy. It may be _easy_, but it's not simple. There are so many more moving pieces, failure modes, operational issues now to consider. Websocket connections aren't free.
I guess I just have to disagree. My experience is that it is robust, and removes an entire category of problems that appear when your state is spread across the back- and frontend.
As someone else mentioned, SSE is a somewhat simpler protocol that achieves the same purpose. Same idea though.
If you mean SSE, then yes that would work just as well (unless you need the bidirectionality for the client to modify some aspect of the connection after the page has loaded). There is an htmx-sse extension too.
I'm not sure how XHR alone would let you automatically get backend state changes reflected to the frontend. You can poll one or more endpoint, but that's more complicated to get right and less efficient.
