Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look. I agree with you, in the core idea. There have really been advances in technology, but for each step made with brilliance and prowess, there have been 3 steps back with laziness and carelessness. 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 s…
Your complain is conflated. Turning off javascript is not akin to turning off macros in a Word document. It’s like deleting your desktop environment and complaining Word doesn’t work in a terminal. 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 comm…
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.