Is the difference between the number of dev dependencies for eg. VueJs (a JavaScript library for marshalling Json Ajax responses into UI) and Htmx (a JavaScript library for marshalling html Ajax responses into UI) meaningful?

There is a difference, but it's not an order of magnitude and neither is a true island.

Granted, deciding not to use JS on the server is reasonable in the context of this article, but for the client htmx is as much a js lib with (dev) dependencies as any other.

https://github.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/blob/master/package.j...

https://github.com/vuejs/core/blob/main/package.json