JS isn't required to display a news article, and never has been. You can make a fast, beautiful and modern news site using only HTML and CSS, without a byte of JS.

Take a look at the source for any molasses-slow news site. The only site-specific JS will be jQuery, and a few basic event handlers to do things like show and hide elements, which could have been done with CSS.

99.9% of the JS will be advertising, analytics, and tracking. People understand that these sites are tracking them, but I think most people have not idea just how much tracking is going on. Major news sites have hundreds of tracking libraries loaded per-page. That is the only reason they are slow.

And adaptive design, auto-complete, client side validation of forms, etc. But all of which should be handled by a better CSS/HTML