This would be boring if it weren't so serious. It's damn time that the Googles of this world were brought to heel with legislation that has real teeth — i.e.: the levying of fines worth 20% upward of annual turnover
as well as heavy fines levied on employees who concoct, design and or deliberately participate in introducing or maintaining these scams.
Once employees are also targeted and held responsible for their actions at law then we stand a chance of getting at least some of our internet back.
Google, Facebook and their cohorts are outrageous, they have been stealing our internet with complete impunity for over two decades like a metastasizing cancer. We users really do need to get proactive over this, if not then soon the internet will be effectively dead for many of us—we'll be left ghettoized in some outpost or alternatively we'll be forced to abandon it altogether. We may even need to resort to street demos or marches to convince politicians that the rotten, monopolistic behavior of Big Tech is no longer to be tolerated.
It's also time we banned non-human entities (aka corporations) from lobbying politicians in private. Any lobbying by them ought to be done at public hearings specifically held for the purpose (corporate lobbying has probably done more damage to our Democracies since the Civil War or even earlier than any single other factor.)
"As someone who routinely uses a browser that does not support Javascript,"
Likewise, my browser has JavaScript turned off by default. 1vuio0pswjnm7, what you failed to mention was how much faster webpages render without JavaScript, when it's switched off the speed improvement is enormous, also all that jerkiness and unevenness of presentation disappears. (As I've posted many times, it's not JavaScript that's the main fault-it's the enormous abuse websites commit using it. It's nothing nowadays for a webpage to be anywhere between 2 and 5MB in size, and on inspection a huge percentage of that code is devoted to serving up you private data to surveillance capitalism. Reality check: remember a standard page of text is only 2kB!)
"Javascript engine has zero effect on the browser's ability to display the information I need from the site. And I still get the info 100% of the time anyway, if I really want it."
Exactly right! Take note website owners who present blank pages when JavaScript is turned off: I used to find it a challenge to get your pages which I then proceed to do anyway. Now I no longer bother, as I've learned that websites that use such scummy lowdown tactics aren't worth visiting anyway. From my observation there's a remarkable correlation between such behavior and the [lack of] quality of the material on the website.