I first read about Unpoly in Stephan Schmidt's Radical Simplicity website[1], I liked it's value prop and decided to try it. I found it bit too complex just as you said. A long time later I came across htmx and decided to try it even after reading a side comment that the library was "like unpoly". 15 minutes later I had a simple to-do list running htmx ajax calls using php and mysqlite in the backend. It was so easy I could not believe such thing could exist. Then I decided to read the Hypermedia book and never stopped using htmx in my projects.

[1] https://www.radicalsimpli.city/