I've been ranting here occasionally about the infuriating unprofessionalism of a web app that can't operate without JS. There is very little that you can do with JS that can't also be done with the help of a server, unless you start making up overly-specific requirements about what technologies are used, or writing user stories for robots. As a diehard NoJS guy and a developer who uses React professionally, my community's willingness to accept of the problem, and obliviousness to the solutions established by the React devs themselves, are pretty embarrassing. And it's not like I hate the language, Node has been my go-to application server for years now (Clojure is displacing that for me, but I digress).

Last year, I was building a simple SVG based chart dashboard for internal usage. Being a NoJS guy, I would sometimes disable JS while developing, on purpose or otherwise, and aside from forcing me to manually hit refresh in the browser, things generally worked. I added a couple links (styled as buttons) for zooming, to supplement the JS based drag-window zoom, and let the browser scroll the potentially very wide SVG chart within a div. If necessary, I could have even embedded the whole thing in an iframe, to avoid triggering whole page reloads, but our caching story was tight enough to compensate. Also, the React-rendered SVG represented the bulk of the markup on the page anyway.

Interactive visualisation, no JS needed. It added maybe an extra 10% to my workload (we already had the SSR stack), and helped me to avoid a variety of little glitches that plague many client-only apps, glitches that users learn to tolerate with mild disgust. The satisfaction of seeing our in-house dashboard pop up "instantly" with data, while Parsely and New Relic were still churning spinners or stuttering while waiting on JS, or even waiting for initial data after waiting on JS, was very cathartic. TTI can equal TTR, we have the technology, we've had it for a decade or so.