In the beginning, there was only HTML. The first official HTML specification focused on semantic markup. There were minimal styling tags and attributes. It was up to the web browser how to render the markup in an HTML document. The whole specification was refreshingly simple. You could easily read it in one sitting…
My career has followed some of that journey, and I also have come back to using Alpine, HTMX, and a server side rendering for SPA-like apps. Some pages are just almost all HTML, and just use HTMX to switch the client content without a page load.