Yeah, totally. I stuck to keeping the code identical between examples, and wrote from the "point of view" of htl, but you can achieve this (and most any) behavior using the old html literals.
Maybe add a cell with:
htl.html`<p>i love ${htl.html`<b>bold</b>`} text</p>`
.. to show people of what to do if they actually want the interpolated string to be interpreted as html? It's obvious if you fully know how htl.html works, but for beginners a quick answer like that can be nice.