Early computers did not have the local processing power needed to run heavy jobs.
Early PCs did not have the storage.
WWW solved an entirely different problem, namely distribution and communication.
JS et. al. solved the problem of responsiveness and interaction ie. latency.
I don't really see those as exhibiting cyclical traits, at best I see it as a correlation ie. side effects of the true problems being solved.
You mean "introduced", right? Back before the modern web, when we all expected software to run on our machines, there was no responsiveness and latency problems, because data didn't travel over the wire unless it absolutely had to.
That said, what I meant is modern JS enabled moving into the web things that should have stayed local. It's literally two step backwards (moving software into "the cloud") and one step forward (giving back some responsiveness through AJAX).
While I generally agree with the sentiment of "do more by coding less", and minimalist user interfaces, there are plenty of cases where you throw a whole lot of functionality out the window by outright banning JS.
> JS et. al. solved the problem of responsiveness and interaction ie. latency.
I don't think either of these statements is correct. There wasn't a problem of 'responsiveness' and 'interaction' on http to begin with, in fact what Sun and Netscape did with javascript was to overengineer the web because they saw it as a business opportunity to add client-side code. http was designed (badly) to exchange hypertext documents, not to perform transactions over the server, or render video-games, or play music and videos, and certainly not to transfer files, for the latter ftp was desgined (also badly).
Regarding latency and responsiveness I agree that they are issues that depend largely on your use cases and your skill at implementing solutions. In this regard I can agree that some pages simply don't need JS. It is also being misused for ads and tracking to a degree that is problematic and can in itself cause issues.