It probably is not “for no reason” – the reason is that the page contains advertising and tracking scripts. The page owner is even willing to lie (pretending that JS is necessary is a flat-out lie if the page works fine without any JS features) so that users enable JS and run those.

In 2013, I created a program to visualize what hosts a web site notifies when it is loaded http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/src/list-web-bugs.py – you can see the output for the article here: http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/pics/graphs/web-bugs/w...

Hey, this is cool! Nice work. I am going to play around with this later.

I also have a page to visualize German newspapers' tracking: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/zeitungs-tracking...

Firefox's reader mode also works

Isn't reader mode effectively an adblocker and no-javascript mode ? That will parse the html and return only what it detects as the divs you want to read ?

Obviously it won't block js if js is technically required to render the page, leaving you open to security risks and compromising your privacy.