That ship sailed the moment JavaScript arrived on the scene, and Flash rode in on its coat-tails. The writing was on the wall: people wanted more from the web, envisioned more for it, than simply interactive documents, and they still do.

Granted, not everybody: some are more than happy with interactive documents. Great, that's awesome, and I hope you're happy, but you don't get to dictate the behaviour of the 99%.

And that figure is not an exaggeration: for my own sites about 1% of people have JS disabled. This post from Yell, over a much larger sample of data, suggests that 0.07% of their visitors disable JavaScript: https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-co....

Granted, a large portion of that 99% won't know or care what JavaScript is, but they'll care if they lose the additional functionality it brings to the sites they use (though, honestly, I doubt they'd miss the ads, for which it's so often misused).

The problem I have is that 99% of my web use is the web as an interactive document - news and articles in particular - but those web sites still load an absolute ton of code.

Yeah, I'm certainly on board with that: vast amounts of ad-related assets and tracking code need to become a thing of the past. Still, for that I have uBlock, and I'm increasingly avoiding the worst offenders on that front anyway.

Still, sites I use on a regular basis that benefit from JS: GitHub (most evident with real-time updates to projects, issues, PRs); Office365; GMail, Google Drive, Google Analytics, Google Docs, the Adsense and Webmaster portals, and - of course - YouTube; Clubhouse (project management, heavier than Trello, lighter than JIRA); Azure management portal; pipeline apps such as TeamCity and Octopus Deploy.

Yeah, no dispute from me on that count, there are a lot of valid uses.

I am getting sick of what I presume is coin-mining code. I was reading an article about keyboards on some site the other day and after a few seconds my laptop started to sound like an aircraft taking off.