Parts of htmx were yoinked out of the core library into an extensions repo relatively recently, as part of htmx 2.0. That might explain the relatively lower number of stars. More important than github stars is that it is indeed part of the htmx project and is documented here https://htmx.org/extensions/
this https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx-extensions/tree/main/... with 159 stars is a basic tool of htmx? is this the community consensus?