I've just replied to you with JS disabled. I also created this account with no JS (this was a year ago). Upvoting also works without JS.

In my experience, of all the websites that don't work without JS, only a minority actually need it. Most of the time it's silly things like articles and blog posts that just show a blank screen without JS, or drop-down menus that rely on JS even though there are perfectly fine non-JS ways to do it, etc.

"Anything that requires JavaScript" might be a better criteria. Hn gracefully falls back without JavaScript enabled because it's not necessary, just some added convenience.

Even then, sites which lack graceful degradation aren't so qualitatively different from the few that do that they need to be moved to an entirely different platform, viewed from a different device and considered "applications" and not "documents." That seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What does make sense to me is a new platform based on WASM, with related tooling. Photoshop in the browser or something running the Unreal Engine or .Net is not the web enough to maybe deserve its own thing. But a new platform based on what are essentially complaints about complexity or efficiency would be too messy.

Yes.

Right now there's next to zero incentive not to use JavaScript. And only slightly more to engineer a working fallback page.

Bifurcating the web would provide one.

You're arguing for a technical solution to what is essentially a cultural problem.

I'd argue that the cultural problem (sites being VM-tech-heavy) is caused by a technology choice (never saying "this much technology is sufficient for a large part of the web").

Or to put it another way, extrapolated down this path README.txt files on the web in the future will only be accessible with a pair of VR goggles.