I disagree with saying "should" here. It's to do with business priorities. How many resources should go into making "they should have a degraded experience, not no experience" true. Well, how many customers will they gain, and how much more money will they make.

Don't forget that LifeHacker is part of Gawker. There's about a dozen sites in that network, probably all using the same codebase. What proportion of Jezebel readers do you think use NoScript?

The answer to that's "none" because they can't view the site with no script turned on :-) what a business should do and what they actually do are, unfortunately two different things. I wouldn't call life hacker a paragon on good design, but then I don't frequent that site very often. And, for the record, I don't use no script, or browse with JavaScript turned off! :-)

I doubt there is a good value proposition for Lifehacker to implement something that works with NoScript. Saying that they should do it, without that, makes no sense.