You are thinking only on two extremes, between a news/blogs and game/collaborative text editor there a thousands of web apps that don't fit the two. What would you call webapp for generating and keeping track of invoices?
I think we forget that the web was a pretty productive thing even before JavaScript was widely used. GMail existed (and still does) in a javascript-free form. You can even use Google Maps without JavaScript. Granted, JavaScript enhances both experiences, but it's not strictly required.
Yep, Javascript is not strictly required but that was what I was trying to refer to, the enhancement part.
A blog or news site like HN doesn't really need much enhancements, a web app for invoices lends itself to be way more interactive than HN.
In your gmail example, the HTML version doesn't have:
Chat
Spell checker
Keyboard shortcuts
Adding or importing contacts
Custom "from" addresses
Rich formatting
> Chat
> Spell checker
> Keyboard shortcuts
> Adding or importing contacts
> Custom "from" addresses
> Rich formatting
Sounds excellent. I might give the Gmail Web interface another go (I've always used it through POP and IMAP in Emacs, due to monstrous "features" like these). Whilst I agree in principle with spell checking and keyboard shortcuts, not only does my browser provide both, but Google's poor wheel-reinventing interferes with them (as does that of many other sites, e.g. GitHub).
As for the "chat", my experience has been that even nudging one's mouse in the wrong way ends up migrating a gtalk account to "hangouts", which doesn't support XMPP and it's very difficult to undo.
To use Gmail, the poster boy of Web 2.0, as an example of why sites don't need to use JavaScript is bizarre. It destroyed other webmail sites because it used JS to give users a real GUI mail client on the web - the HTML backup works, but if that was all they'd given us we'd still be on Hotmail.
Re: Gmail. It won, not because of its slick JavaScript features (really, there weren't many when it came out in 2004). It won because of the impressive (at the time) storage space they gave you.
My point is that JavaScript has it place in modern web dev, and saying we should just get rid of it is ridiculous, and not what this article says at all.
Gmail won for many reasons, but usability was a big part of it, and it wouldn't be possible to even auto-complete an email address without JavaScript
JS had maybe it's share, but Gmail was minimal, condensed and fast. Literally no one had that back then and today no one knows because competition is dead. Now every webapp is JS heavy, but there is still a great difference in minimalism. Not saying that google products are small, but they seem to have a better balance in "fancy" user interaction than the rest of the web. The reckless transition to a modern web with more bells and whistles takes it's toll, mostly because "we can", but it should be "make sense here".
Most apps are never going to be 'web scale', and most of the time there's no trade off to make. Either the devs use libraries to make something work fast and live with a big js bundle, or they optimise too early and go down the perf rabbit hoe and run out of runway. If your product is of enough value your customers aren't going to care about 1-2 seconds, and if it becomes an issue you can do the perf work later.
Maybe another way to put it is that I don't mind enabling and loading JS for a site where interactivity is clearly core functionality, but if it's essentially serving text, then a JS-heavy design feels like it's working against the user, not for the user.