Such is the case for most JS sites, the site typically doesn't break "entirely", but I consider being unable to post or even read comments to be a major functional breakdown. Comments are non-interactive text, there's no justifiable reason why I should need JS to read them.
For a blog? I disagree, because the point of a blog is to read the author’s comments, not those of third parties.
> Comments are non-interactive text, there's no justifiable reason why I should need JS to read them.
I kinda agree. The issue is that it is very rare to find a static site generator which can interface with a dynamic comment storage. To be honest, I don’t know that one exists, although of course it is completely possible. I can understand as a pragmatic matter why someone might have a static blog, want to add comments and not be willing to run his own dynamic comment system, esp. if that would entail writing said system.
All that being written, it would be awesome to have a static site generator which were called by a hook in a dynamic comment server. I actually would like to write one someday!
The author has posted several comments in the comment section, so even by your definition the blog fails to meet functional standards. However, IMO, the distinction between the author's comments and user comments is arbitrary, both are text meant to be read by readers, and those readers without JS are missing a ton of discussion that's happening in the comments, including discussion with the author. There's actually more to read in the comment section than in the blog post itself.
> All that being written, it would be awesome to have a static site generator which were called by a hook in a dynamic comment server. I actually would like to write one someday!
I have actually seen a system like this implemented at company I used to work for. A posted comment would be stored in a sqlite database before a request to rebuild the comment section is fired (as a partial, to avoid re-rendering the whole page/site), subsequently dumping the new build into the CDN (with some debounce logic to throttle high comment traffic). The rebuild was typically sub-second and performed very well.
Though I wonder if the prevalence of programmable edge networks will leapfrog that before it becomes really mainstream, and allow site owners to add a small bit of edge dynamism to pull dynamic content in without client-side JS.
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