Second, I actually thought the same as you but digging into the history I don't see any records of a public release of Hotwire until December of 2020, and HTMX was public in May of that year. Both commit logs and first HN submissions are in agreement on those dates, but if you have other evidence I'm open to it.
I'm pretty sure what I was thinking of was actually Turbolinks:
As noted by @madeofpalk [0], Hotwire is the successor of Turbolinks, which dates back to at least 2012 [1].
That said, I'm not particularly interested in litigating who inspired who. Both libraries are neat and have developed in parallel for ten years. That's cool!
For what it's worth, I mentioned HTMX to a Ruby developer friend, and his reaction was "oh, like Turbolinks", so I think the mindshare was probably there first. That having been said, HTMX is my preferred way of making dynamic frontends now. I've never been a React developer, but I've always found SPAs way, way overused.
Yeah, Turbolinks was huge throughout the Rails era—I remember it even being part of the random beginner tutorials that I did back in the day. I only ever heard of intercooler.js after htmx was announced.
