I don't see why it needs to go that far. They could have just not used the optional chaining operator, or used a pre-processor if they really wanted to use it.
Very few people are browsing with no JS at all, and they are doing it deliberately. They probably disagree with me, but I don't think anyone should do extra work for them.
> browsing with no JS at all,
It's about building a reliable product. I've witnessed tons of cases of websites broken due to Javascript. Sometimes they were broken in Firefox, other times they were broken only in some locales...
Often they were not broken forever, a bad release got pushed, and it took some times for the problems to be identified and addressed... but in the meanwhile, a specific part of their website was broken 100% of the time.
If you're building the new Google Maps, sure... knock yourself out with the fanciest Javascript you can find (but even then, I'd set a restrictive CSP, to avoid other script from interfering, and I'd pick something like Elm to make sure that runtime errors are minimized). But if you're building anything else, you should really try to keep it simple (even Gmail still has its plain HTML version)
Progressive enhancement isn't about building sites completely without JS. It's about building resilient sites that work on edge cases like this.
Every business has to make the choice, but unless I was running a pretty large operation, I'd be willing to ignore 1.3% to put my budget into other things.
The cost to make a website accessible to everyone is so high that it really only makes sense for critical websites.
They are literally the 3 client “languages” of the web.
Everything your abstractions/frameworks do is produce html, css, and js.