What makes you think it isn't a requirement coming from their superiors?
There are many reasons your link may not work. Why do you assume incompetence?
There are many reasons your link may not work. Why do you assume incompetence?
The problem is not JS the language but how it is abused and similar to Flash you get people installing plugins or turning it off in settings and white-listing JS on necessary pages, in my case I will not read the article most of the time or use a private window.
I completely disagree with this, if I'm understanding you correctly. As someone who disables Javascript, I don't want you to purposely break a page that previously worked (in the sense of being able to read the content of the article) simply because a portion of it which I might not even use doesn't work.
The fully competent solution would be to use progressive enhancement[1] (i.e., use functioning anchor elements initially, and use Javascript to add the Javascript-only functionality on top of the HTML solution).
If you don't have time for that, the somewhat-competent solution for alerting non-technical users that Javascript is disabled would be to add a banner at the top of the page (like Stack Exchange does) stating that some features will be broken without Javascript.