Guess I've been doing a bad job for a long time now.
“All [UK] government services must follow progressive enhancement, even if part of the service or a parent service needs JavaScript”
But more seriously, it's okay to do a bad job if you're being paid/forced to do it by a for-profit entity. That's what jobs are. Being paid to do things you wouldn't do otherwise (like making a webpage entirely inaccessible to people with screen readers because there's no text in the custom-elements pre-JS execution and not caring because the visually impaired don't contribute significantly to profit). Just don't chose to do a bad job for personal stuff.
Please, please just consider putting actual text in the HTML. It helps a lot.