Before my reply, a request to designers: please arrange your elements so that they make sense when viewed without styles, for curmudgeons like me,
and for people who use text browsers and visual assist tools. Important content first, and sidebars and ads last, would be great.
Reply: It works better than leaving the site as-is, in an unreadable or annoying state.
This happens most often, believe it or not, with news outlets (sorry, can't think of one). What you get is an incredibly long page, with the content usually somewhere in the middle, preceded and followed by multiple instances of links to the same other stories. It's not that hard to just grab the mouse and zoom the scroll bar down to what looks most obviously like what you're looking for: a bunch of unmolested text paragraphs.
With "private" sites like personal blogs and whatnot, the result of hitting the no styles button is the same, but usually the useless before and after matter is not as long.
I really don't have a problem doing that, and once I get to unmolested content I almost always enjoy it or find it useful. It's better than bailing, most of the time, and there doesn't seem to be any correlation between "this site sucks for me visually" and the quality of the actual content. So it's usually worth giving it a try.
EDIT: >A big part of design (aside from visual pleasantness) is information hierarchy, ...
This is virtually never important to me, because I virtually never get to anyone's page from their front page. I got to your page through someone else's aggregation. HN obviously. The NYT front page (hold on, hold on :) is just an aggregator of links to their stories, and the front page looks nothing like the story pages. Google news is an aggregator to pages within other outlets' aggregations.
I virtually always ignore virtually everything on a page that's not the content I came to read, and nothing on any of the site's other pages helped me get there, because I was never there. Someone else must have been there for the HN link to exist, and maybe (or maybe not) the ephemera helped them make a link for me. But it wasn't me.
Why do I not visit Art of Manliness, or some software blog, regularly? Because they rarely post anything I care about, certainly not often enough for me to gamble my time that maybe, this time, I'll find something worth reading. Investors use OPM, Other Peoples' Money, to make money. I use OPT, Other Peoples' Time, to find content worth reading on the web, and I'm as unapologetic as investors for that.
Mmmm, coffee ...