What ever happened to fail gracefully?

If you cripple your browser some websites will break. Don't expect site owners to make them work just for you.

Fail gracefully was over the moment the "disable javascript" checkbox was removed from the options menu in every major browser.

In this case, the site owner is deliberately sabotaging non-JavaScript users in order to get them to run ad-tracking and analytics. There isn't actually a good-faith reason to require JavaScript here.

The site owner profits from showing ads. There's little business reason for them to show ad-less pages to users. What does good faith have to do with it? They're not assuming you'll hack them or steal their content, it's a matter of business.

My Chrome still has a radio button (admittedly not a checkbox...) that will disable javascript on all sites.

There's a distinction to be made between content sites and application sites. It's really just too much work to try to make an application fall back to plain HTML, but for a content-centered site, like a blog, a news site, etc, it's not that hard to do things right and not require JS.

> If you cripple your browser some websites will break.

A browser which doesn't implement JavaScript is not crippled; it is 100% functional. A web page which requires JavaScript is crippled, because JavaScript is not required in order to display text and images.

It's the website that's crippled - and intentionally so!

Opportunity cost happened.

You can't run ads or track your users that way.

Yes you can, actually. It's just more work to set it up properly but you absolutely can track user easily server side and you can serve ads without JS just fine.

But you can't automatically relay those capabilities to untrusted 3rd parties. And that's where the money is.

Can you elaborate on there the money is exactly? Is it in selling data points about your visitors?

It is in running 3rd party trackers on your site.