I think that’s a reasonable take on htmx v. hotwire. htmx doesn’t focus nearly as much on progressive enhancement, although there is a mechanism for doing so (hx-boost).
htmx is attempting to push HTML to its logical conclusion as a hypertext and, hence, is lower level than what hotwire looks like at first glance. (I’m looking at it as an ousider, so take all this with a grain of salt.) With htmx, the idea is to surface as much as possible in straight HTML and generalize the concept of a hypertext: event triggers, requests, targets for replacement, etc.
I would expect hotwire to work more smoothly out of the box, and kick out to Stimulus when necessary, whereas htmx would likely be more explicit work, but can probably go farther before it is necessary to resort to javascript.
Both reasonable approaches. Regardless of what direction someone decides to go, I’m glad to see HTML-oriented libraries making a resurgence.