This keeps coming up.
Personally I keep thinking that devs and cv-driven development might be to blame as I rarely hear any customer demand anything that demands a frontend framework for their web sites (now web apps, that's another story).
The real problem is that fashions are even possible on the web. This is what Ted Nelson calls the "triumph of typesetters over authors," and it's one of the great tragedies of the computer age. We could have had a real, global, hypertext system with working two way links and micropayments, but instead we got HTTP and HTML.
If you have other content though, it's not OK to not show anything; only the graph should be missing without javascript, the rest of the page should still render.
You can put data for the graph into a table, then use a script to render that table as a graph. If people cared enough, graph libraries could expect heir data in table format.
Saddly most graph libraries seem to love json data formats, which aren't logically table oriented... though if you used the json data and javascript to load the table and create the graph...
I think people expect much more interactivity now, (I think google maps was a driver and web based email as well), so it became harder to do pure back end. For example a lot of the queries I run now show a dynamically generated graph. I can do that on the back end, but much easier to use a javascript charting package. I guess I could just use javascript all the way down