Remember back in the early days they wanted all agnostic tags and no specific rendering or design stuff. You can request it be bold, or a heading, but I would decide how a heading or bold looked... that quickly gave way to the more prescriptive (designed) web, with the site controlling how a h1 looks ... which then gave way to the application web, where web sites use scripts and act as small applications.
Disabling JavaScript at this point is like disabling CSS IMHO.
Even the more technical users I work with, that can do basic HTML, don't look at the source of other pages. In fact, I think with the tools built into the browser becoming so good, they actually look at the final markup if anything.
It may also be the case for me, but I wonder if you're more upset about the prevalence of JS in the modern web.
There's certainly bad uses of JS, but then when I see something like Gmail I personally am glad it evolved like it did.
No, it's not as simple as it was 15+ years ago when I first got on the web, but it's so dynamic and interesting ...