You won't keep those performance numbers if the network conditions are bad, unfortunately. For things that require a network round trip, that's fine, because doing it via JSON (or some other serialization format) won't save you anyway. On the other hand, if it can be done entirely on the client, adding network round trips will slow the interaction down. It sounds like you're mostly doing the former (otherwise loading indicators and serialization wouldn't matter), but it's a point that should still be emphasized.
I think you misunderstood me. I use htmx where most people would use fetch. I do not just use htmx willy nilly for no reason.
I use pure front end manipulation to set state, then I send the state to the stateless back end with pure functions, and I get amazing performance: www.multicardz.com public test bed, 1M records, round trip usually around 160 ms for anywhere between 1 to 100K hits