I’m not sure if you’re really thinking about the impact of not having any javascript. Want to reply to a comment on HN? The whole page reloads. Want to upvote a comment? The whole page reloads. Sure you can give every comment an ID and reload back to where you were, but then you can’t have collapsible comments (because css, presumably what you’re hacking for collapsible comments without JS, can’t respond to anchor references).
There’s a million other usability things that require JS, it’s so much more than a macro language.
There are bad practices everywhere, in every field, and it feels like everyone feels they have the authority to beat down JS, and web dev as a whole, likely with zero experience working with it.
Web arguably has the best developer experience of any field. It’s so good, they took the web and put it in your desktop. Electron, GTK, KDE, everything is javascript.
The war is lost and over. Start arguing/discussing how JS can be improved instead that it shouldn’t exist (there’s PLENTY to complain about, don’t get me wrong).
Then read this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849820
> you can still view it through https://nitter.net, which I guess makes the open source Javascript-less front-end to Twitter more accessible for SEO
WHAT? I had no idea. So there is Nitter [1] frontend for Twitter -which is a platform clearly more complicated than HN- and they manage to not only work without JavaScript, but have it as one of their core motivations.
Things get even better, from that project I find about Invidious [2], a frontend for nothing else than YouTube! And again, no JS is not only an option but a highlighted feature.
After these discoveries, my bar for how JS-free we should expect most websites to be has just gone up, not down. Especially those websites consisting on just presenting text and media (i.e. the immense majority)
I agree the war is lost, though. Luckily there will still exist people desiring and making noise for a leaner and faster experience. The problem is bloated frameworks and privacy invasion via JS. Those are essentially my main reasons to want to browse the Web without JS.
Some applications of the newer technologies merit their use.
Most use cases, however, don't.
Bad practices abound, the "art" of programming becomes a chore made by let's say not very skilled people. Luckily there are still lots of good managers and good devs that value adequately done products, but on average that's not the case and the Web gets more and more bloated as a whole.
One day you decide to disable JavaScript in your phone (which BTW is an incredible way to speed up modern webshit, as the sibling comment puts it, in under-powered mobile devices), and turns out that lots of f*ing blogs don't load their plain text and static pictures if JS is not enabled. That's an absurd situation we've collectively ended up in.
The mere thought of having a Word document with just text, images, and a couple tables, and not being able to open it if VB macros were disabled, sounds absurd. But that's exactly what large parts of the Web have become.