Who exactly is asking for slower software?
I'm sorry but it's right there in the name
As much as we could argue about whether no-js support really matters or not in 2020, the fact remains that having to having to load Vue.js and have it parse and render the frontend on the client is not really "lightweight", especially when the most popular competing products pre-render on the backend.
It wouldn't honestly be that much of an issue if it was a SPA (and it must do SPA-ish things already if it uses Apollo) so you just load the frontend once and it'd load other pages asynchronously, but nope. Every link is a full page reload, with Vue having to re-do everything every time.
It just reeks of modern tech used in an old fashioned way, which ends up with the performance penalties from both.
Go browse any other wiki, see how much faster and smoother the experience is.
I would say using js without having a no-js version is ok, if done correctly.
Please ensure that if you mention your service or system on HN it works over telnet and outputs plain ascii.
Also noticed that it feels slow page to page, thinking that it might be an issue with my Firefox configuration I opened the page on a fresh profile and it's still slow, but if you open it in Chrome page to page becomes almost instant and is more comparable to MediaWiki. So maybe this particular performance issue on FF can be resolved but it does seem like a worse end user experience when compared to MediaWiki.
But yes, not loading without Javascript is a showstopper.
Is Node.js that blazing-fast ?
It is based on V8 which in many (caveat: far from all) benchmarks comes out as the fastest JS engine, so by that definition in the realm of JS powered components it is pretty quick.
node.js solutions will often perform better than common configurations of other options too - Apache+PHP to pick one example out of the air. Then again, depending on the code other configurations of PHP might outperform Node.