I have never used a chocolate teapot, but anchor tags (and form tags) have been an important piece of the success of the World Wide Web as a hypermedia system.
htmx generalizes this notion of hypermedia controls in a syntactically symmetric manner, preserving the locality of behavior inherent in those controls.
it's not about the tag, it's about the claim that putting /clicked in the href or equivalent is somehow superior to $("#the-button"). click(function () { do stuff here}).
right exactly, it is superior in Locality of Behavior (LoB) terms because the behavior of the tag is apparent by only looking at it, whereas in the jquery example the behavior is in code that is located elsewhere.
It is also inferior in Separation of Concerns(SoC) terms.
These two design principles are in conflict and the reason I invented the term LoB was to help people, like myself, who prefer locality to argue for it effectively in software design discussions.
htmx generalizes this notion of hypermedia controls in a syntactically symmetric manner, preserving the locality of behavior inherent in those controls.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3648188.3675127