Sure there are cases where JS is incredibly useful and beneficial, but your website should be able to display the majority of content with JS disabled.
That's not what it is anymore. It has evolved into a general, distributed computing and communications platform. More and more uses of this platform require doing things that involve customized behaviors, not just the built-in features for displaying articles, so more and more people leave JS enabled. Kids who couldn't have afforded a family PC and MS Office now have a Chromebook at school (and maybe at home) and free Google Docs. And how many people whose only internet access device is a phone turn JS off in their phone?
I think it makes more sense now to treat the JS-disabled, article-browsing case as the exception. If I were trying to distribute public health articles as widely as possible, I would try to limit them to simple text, small photos, no JS, nothing that wouldn't have worked 20 years ago. And even for less-critical articles, if they were just simple articles, I'm still inclined to leave out the JavaScript in most cases for the sake of simplicity, reliability, reach, and archival robustness.
But for general purpose today, most developers in the developed world can assume JS is going to be enabled by the market they want to target.
That's an entirely different discussion than what the parent was discussing though. This is about those cases where you're not building a static website.
"HTML was not enoug for writing applications"