It's possible to agree with or refute you based on the definition of the definition of "highly interactive apps". But I can qualify it this way. If htmx (maybe with hypertext or alpine.js) is enough for your app then I would say it's much easier to do it with htmx than a js framework. The frameworks come with the kitchen sink and are not trivially easy to even keep running due to node updates, bundlers etc. They are also very complicated and as with every framework, you start to see the limitations as you start doing more complicated stuff or go out of the happy path. Another way I can qualify it is, I can write a semi interactive website with htmx at my current experience level with Javascript but I can't do that with most frameworks. Where you are probably right without qualification is when the programmer/team is already using said framework and has experience with it.