When we get to critical mass? More like "if". I doubt the majority (crushing majority even) of active web browsers will ever get to that length. Especially noscript, which makes some sites completely useless.
Browsing the web with NoScript is far more pleasant, even if I have to sometimes open a menu to enable a couple domains to make a poorly developed website usable. I'd highly recommend it to anyone even remotely technical.
Some websites need more than text or images.
1. Is there anything the site owner can do to turn that off?
2. Is it because they inject some kind of DDoS prevention/tracking thing? This suggests crawlers load JS, which I wouldn't have necessarily assumed.
The complaint isn't with the scripting language, but with the blatantly unnecessary use of it.
One of the principles of human-friendly design is graceful degradation. For instance, you might design a museum for people that can walk. But some visitors might not be able to walk, so for them you install ramps and elevators when the stairs are not usable.
At the very minimum level, where someone is manually typing in HTTP requests, over a direct TCP connection to port 80 of your site, you should be returning something that can be read. Some people (or bots) may be fetching your site with curl or wget or links. Some people may be using screen readers. Some people may need machine assistance with pointer movement or scrolling. Some people may have extremely limited bandwidth, and won't automatically download images or frame contents.
If you can't degrade gracefully, your website is "poorly developed". So if you are utterly reliant on scripting to display anything at all, that certainly qualifies.