JS is a fine tool for making rich, interactive UIs in the browser and IMO avoiding it at all costs shouldn't be a priority
Most "webapps" (e.g. almost every bank or brokerage I use, or mint/tax tools/...) are more simple yet are bloated, slow, buggy atrocities. Especially Chase Bank, I say it without exaggeration is that if I was making a hiring decision for one of the developers of that site and the only alternative they had was to slowly starve to death, I would still not hire them.
As someone whose first fun tech job was writing complicated (B2B) Javascript apps in the days when prototype.js was cool new tech and you still had to support IE6, I've come to regret that Javascript even exists, and I'd personally love for web scripting to be made illegal. If your thing is more complicated than GMail, write a native app.
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Are you kidding me? The JavaScript version of Gmail is awful. One of the slowest client-side apps I've had the displeasure to use. Full-fat Gmail used to be fast and pleasant to use (and at that point it was indeed faster than the plain HTML version), but they did a rewrite a few years back and completely borked it.
Expanding your toolbelt with this knowledge is like giving yourself an extra set of native functions.
JS (well, TS) is fine but it's not good. I'm a frontend dev, and I use JS, React and Next daily for making a rich clientside-driven app that uses a sprinkling of serverside rendering to gather up some data every page needs at the start, and it's nice to work with. It's easy and our velocity is great because of it. If we ever go fully serverside with no code shared on the frontend I'll be arguing that JS is the wrong language for the job because we can be faster, and safer, in something like golang.
We shouldn't be afraid of abandoning JS if we don't need JS.
* Modularisation is really easy. Components are ultimately just functions, with all the benefits for splitting up and deduplicating code that that brings. You don't need to create files to split up code units, which makes it a lot easier to create smaller, more flexible units.
* You're writing templates in a real programming language, ideally one you already know. Yes, there's a bit of syntax sugar with JSX, although in principle you don't need it, but everything else is just javascript. For example, things like importing other files just works - there's no special "partials" directory, and you don't need to figure out how this templating library approaches paths.
* You can manage your CSS much more easily with tools like CSS-in-JS or CSS Modules. Your styles are scoped to your components, which means that dead styles are much easier to find and remove, and you're less likely to have "action at a distance" issues from unexpected rules applying in places you don't expect.
* You have access to a lot of tooling dedicated to front-end development, in particular bundlers that can automatically build your static pages, compress images, optimise CSS, etc. While it can be a pain to get this set up, once it's there, it's a very powerful tool to sending well-optimised results to browsers.
So in principle, I agree that we shouldn't use JS if we don't need it, but my problem is often that, although the space for better tooling clearly should exist, it just isn't there.
Here are the things worth using on this page: Modal, everything under Forms. That's it.
But following standards and avoiding hacky CSS implementations for mission critical interfaces still sounds like a good idea to me
You are legally allowed to make an accessibility hellscape of an intranet site :)
[0] https://www.ada.gov/regs2010/titleII_2010/titleII_2010_withb....
And for everything else you should probably just use a CMS.
If you want a site to work in Tor Browser then it had better work without JS.
Considering something like 98-99% of users at our current company use chrome or safari, we don't even prioritize firefox / edge unless there are user complaints (which there aren't many of because we use modern JS so there are generally only tiny differences between browsers if any). Again our resources are limited and there's only so much we can do
Exactly, this is 2022. I used to be one of those types running Firefox (since the late 90s) with NoScript and other extensions to have 100% ultimate control over who and who could not run JavaScript.
It's ubiquitous now, it's sandboxed, it's safe and extremely performant.
There's no reason to go backwards now.
Sometimes. Counter examples are facebook and the Reddit remake.