Encouraging better design and graceful decay didn't work, because it was too easy not to care.
If you want good design to be the majority, it must be the path of least resistance.
The key observation, that generalizes to a lot of societal woes: can be used doesn't mean will be used. Asking people for restraint doesn't work in general, and doubly so in a competitive environment. That's why asking for restraint generally never works, you can either take away the toys (a quick fix) or find a way to force restraint on people.
You mean like scroll-jacking? Some script that prevents me from copying and pasting? Something that loads images later for some reason and shifts everything around?
I don’t mean to be facetious, I am genuinely curious what you mean. In my experience JS has been nothing but a detriment (for reading documents, that is), and I have it disabled on all of my computers.