I do not understand your comment. Progressive Enhancement (and I've done it) has a lot going for it, but "easier" or "as easy" isn't the case. Thus time and resources are spent to get the same functionality.
Example: I make a form. It works without JS, so my server has to generate the form, handle the request where the form is submitted, and generate the result HTML. If I'm practicing good separation of concerns, the work is done in a service/contained library that the webserver code calls and assembles into a page. Then I go to add a "nice" Js experience: disable the normal form submit, read the form data, send the request, parse what I need out of the HTML result ("parse" = easy cut here) and replace the portion of the DOM involved. A nice, maintainable PE site. Nothing wrong with that.
But if I have the server generate the original page only, I can have JS read the form, call the service, and update the DOM. I was able to completely skip the server composing a new page. And that's for a bone-simple form, if my site has any interaction on that form before submit, each step represents duplicated effort. Checking if a name is already used? JS to call a service and add a line. Server/service absolutely needs to check that, but if we're not worrying about PE we can completely skip worrying about a nice UI generated on the server-side (which would involve re-populating the form we got, so it's not just "same HTML + one line"). And that's still the stupid-simple stuff.
To do this I need to design the application w/o JS and then find nice ways to improve it. But my designers, my PMs, they are all thinking from a JS-first point of view, so without PE when they say "do X" I can do X. With PE when they say "do X" I need to figure out how to do Y (a flow they didn't consider at all), and make sure it can behave like X. Anywhere it's hard to do so, it's on me to fix that because neither design nor business consider PE remotely important or valuable.
PE is great, and I'd love to work on more sites that use it...but I'll confess I rarely put forth the effort myself, even when I do have the space to do so in a project. Because Progressive Enhancement IS effort (most importantly time), effort that will most likely be seen by a single digit number of users and I've got a lot of stuff I want to do and a lot I need to do. Even a free hour can improve my productivity or quality for far more users if I spend it in something other than PE.
PE has very real benefits beyond just working without JS...but even those benefits rarely outweigh the time/effort costs in an industry where there's always far more work than time.