But there are some people who go to buildings every day who need an alternative to stairs. People in wheelchairs, with walkers, with strollers, transporting something heavy on wheels, and other scenarios I can't even think of right now, all rely on ramps to access areas that others access through stairs, and may find stairs to be more accessible. They are often a relatively small percentage of the population, but they exist, and as a society, we have decided that they deserve access to our buildings.

Similarly, there are visitors to my websites who require an alternative accommodation to JavaScript, such as people with slower devices which don't perform well with JS enabled, people who are concerned about security and privacy, people who are using a text-mode browser, people who are using something like wget to archive the site for later reading, and so on. There are, just like with the ramps, scenarios I can't even think of right now, but that are accommodated by allowing no-JS access.

And I'm going to continue choosing to accommodate them, bending over backwards to do everything I can to ensure that each and every visitor is treated like they are visiting a five-star hotel, not a prison.

Of course, this philosophy is not for everyone, obviously not for the Gmail team, and perhaps not for you either, but it works for me and my conscience.

Javascript can fail to load for a lot more reasons than just the user disabling it. Noscript is the only way to let the user know that's occurred or to ensure some functionality doesn't break. In fact Google Analytics uses a noscript tag containing an iframe as a fallback to keep the data flowing even when stuff like a content security policy or bad network request causes the javascript to fail.