Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're a web developer but your mental map of the web consists of "documents" on one end and "applications like a video game, video/audio/level/text editor(s)" on the other? You haven't in your career, stumbled across web (sites/apps) that sit somewhere on the spectrum between the extremes of "document" vs "app"? It strikes me that there's a fairly even distribution between those two points - even if we discount all…
Most links we opened daily are to read stuff not to interact with stuff, either read documentation, read news, read some social media page. Those pages should be readable without scripting but for some reason they do not load at all without JS.
Yes. That was the bit where I mentioned "progressive enhancement".