Is there a list somewhere of what websites actually work without JavaScript enabled?
I don't think there is a list, but I'd say it heavily depends on your browsing behaviour. In my case the vast majority of web sites that I access randomly (mostly trough some feed or aggregator) are text based and actually more pleasant to use without js: Faster, no jumping around of content, no obnoxious subscribe modals, almost zero ads, etc. If it doesn't work without js, I usually just close the tab. I hold the view, that if something is important enough for me to care, it will reach me in some form or the other eventually.
But if you are mostly about multi media content, checking out tech demos or similar, you are going to have a bad time.
You can use the "Quick JS switcher" plugin to easily enable js for a page
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quick-js-swit...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...
I'm quite lenient in white listing, because for me personally disabling js is mostly about performance. If I'm interested enough in a web sites offering and see the utility of it requiring js, I'm also willing to wait a little. But I'm not patient by default
Good: HN works well and handles the downgrade gracefully (ex: upvoting becomes a POST rather than AJAX).
Bad: The original Reddit site works ok but the new React based one one fails miserably as it shows a loading screen that never changes.
But reddit seems to know they suck at websites: you can still access https://old.reddit.com/r/<whatever> and even https://old.reddit.com/r/<whatever>/.compact for the old site and the old old site.
People who are also writing content-based apps and want to write once but still obtain native speeds on mobile? The lack of right-click functionality is just bad design, not React's fault.
With browsers and heavy JavaScript frameworks? That's an oxymoron right there.
The truth is, people/organizations doing this simply put other concerns above user experience and friendliness.
There is nothing native about a website which has actual lagging while I scroll when the previous version could do it just fine in desktop mode.
The irony is, Reddit on mobile is god-awful slow. It takes a good 5-10 seconds of displaying a spinner just to show me a kilobyte of text (self-post or linked comment). I no longer click Reddit links on mobile for this reason.
Reddit has got to have talented people working for it. But whatever they're doing that results in a 10-second spinner to display pure text is "Mongo DB is web-scale" levels of comedy.
React is fine for browser-based line-of-business (and I guess also collaboration) apps; for content, not so much because you have to go through hoops to parse content into React's vdom [1].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50420248/how-to-parse-a-...
Reactive Native's primary selling point (and nature of existence) is that it uses native components instead of wrapping a webview. This is the most obvious, relevant, and hyped detail of React Native. So your statement, "React Native is a browser" implying the same performance penalties as visiting as a website or using Cordova/PhoneGap, is false.
https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv
I think there needs to be a movement to bring the WWW back to basic, readable, low-JS, animation-free, content-based sites.
(Also, they probably save money on electricity by externalizing more and more processing to users.)