but then they go back to leading a much more difficult online life than the rest of the world.
I completely disagree, because I don't have to routinely subject myself to the barrage of useless distracting noise (adverts and whatever else) caused by JS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871967 (The rest of the comments on that item are worth reading too.)
Also, "JS off" is very much in agreement with "don't run untrusted code", something which everyone who cares about security in any way would have no problem with.
Yes I advocate for JS to be a part of the web. There are good reasons for it. But regardless, it has nothing to with advocates. We are in this situation because browser vendors included JS and developers and users found it useful. Again, you are free to deny the idea that this is irreversible, but I am with the 99.99% of users of the web who have JS enabled.
Edit: QoL is subjective of course, but let me ask you this: when was the last time you really had JS enabled by default and how did you measure the trade off? My suspicion is that most people who put on their tin foil hat^W^W^W^W^W^Wturn off JS by default don't actually turn it back on frequently, and spend a whole lot of their lives fiddling with drop down menus to enable/disable JS on specific sites.
Even without special extensions and keyboard shortcuts you spend very little time on fiddling with menus. It seems like a lot only at the beginning and quickly gets to near no fiddling at all. But it also saves time on various things, like when your adblocker doesn't catch something and you have to close those clickunder born popups or see a page full of ads where it's hard to even find the content, things also load faster and so on.
My only problem without javascript is cloudflare. They truly are sabotaging it, giving impossible to solve captchas for example.
I fully support not making content delivery rely on JS. But I disabling JS because it can be used for intrusive ads is a lot like taking the wheels off your car because it can take you to the mall where you might see big for sale signs and annoying sales people. Effective, but stupid.
You should try it sometime. Selectively enabling JS will be annoying at first, but as long as you save your preferences, the web will soon become a much less terrible place, and you'll rarely have to tweak your config. This approach won't work for non-techies, of course, but it's not much of a hardship for someone vaguely familiar with how the web works. Amazon, for example, works fine with a bit of JS not including amazon-adsystem.com.
Slacks has an IRC gateway, though.
I'm not sure what the advantages of this argument are anymore. JS is now so ubiquitous I can only imagine how a drive-by JS exploit can truly mess you up in obscure ways despite the fact you browse the web with IE4.
And this is not gonna change before a huge paradigm shift in network protocols and network apps.
Accusing people not running browsers that expose them to a nasty bug of feeling an exaggerated sense of "smugness"?
This seems disrepectful of users.
Doesnt that violate HN guidelines?