I agree with you about avoiding dependencies; I try to reduce dependencies myself. Many projects have a lot of dependencies, but I prefer to reduce dependences instead, I think is better.

I will write documents as plain text, and I agree with your idea to make them accessible as text is good.

I and others will write computer games and other stuff using simpler VMs than the web browser, such as Famicom and Glulx (both of which can also be implemented to work within the web browser, too). (Z-machine is also very portable; there are implementations for many computers, and I even wrote implementation of Z-machine in Glulx and in PostScript, and started (but never completed) writing one for Famicom (which has my own unusual mapper design too, with a bank size of only one byte, and mapper registers overlapping mirrors of internal RAM).)

Another thing can be, if you have a discussion forum, then I think NNTP is good (better than mailing list and web forum), although you can have mailing list and web forum with the same messages as the NNTP too. Even if the web interface requires JavaScripts to work, I would still insist that at least one thing works even without JavaScript and CSS, which is the link to the NNTP, including the message ID or newsgroup name. (It may also be used with the web forum allowing Markdown and then they appear in NNTP with "Content-type: text/markdown", which is something I have seen suggested; however, I think plain text is also fine and is my own preference.) (I also made up "Unusenet", which is a way of making newsgroup names which are not part of Usenet; all Unusenet newsgroup names begin with "un" and one or more digits and then a dot, and then the rest of the newsgroup name.) (Also, like IRC, NNTP can also be used without specialized software for it, although also like IRC, it is more convenient and work better if you do have such software, and it is not as difficult to write as the web browser software.)