The web worked because of its unique network architecture (REST/HATEOAS) which handles a chaotic, loosely coupled and dynamically evolving network topology extremely well.
The web suffered from the fact that HTML was a limited hypertext, which hurt usability and encouraged javascript-based work arounds. So we should fix that, rather than tossing the idea of a hypertext architecture. (That's exactly what I tried to do with https://htmx.org, which just went 1.0 btw)
There are tons of hacks and problems with layout and all the rest, but that has nothing to do with using javascript over the original hypertext model for the web. That's just how real world systems end up when they are the most successful network architecture ever devised.