Well-written websites look great it it; poorly-written ones look terrible or are blank pages. That’s the same as with any other text-mode browser.

A lot of sites require Javascript to function, even when their actual functionality does not (pro tip: if you use Javascript to display text, show images or create links, you are doing it wrong). That’s a real shame.

As a general rule, the best sites work great, and the worst ones don’t work at all. This is not entirely a bad thing! It cna make web browsing less distracting. I often use a text-mode browser as a primary, and fall back to Firefox when using some Javascript-laden monstrosity.

This response was written from Lynx within a tmux session: Hacker News remains a notable bastion of simplicity, usability, and accessibility. Lynx is my primary browswer, but precisely because I desire a degree of separation from the "modern" internet. This requires curation. Many sites simply do not work. But this practice gives me space to reconsider what I actually want from the web and what the web wants from me.

Lynx is still valuable even if one doesn't use it to browse the web.

It's been a while but when large sites would every so often alter their link landscape, via pruning or renaming, Lynx was a useful tool when looking for similar pages that may not be displayed by search engines with the given query parameters, (non matching name,) and more often it was Lynx I'd use as it was quick to dump most of the links to search though later on if I needed to rather than deploy wget's spider mode

lynx -dump -listonly -nonumbers http://foobar.com/ >foobar.txt

The problem, for the sites I'm interested in, typically isn't the lack of JavaScript, but how the sites layout. Take Wikipedia, the content is perfectly fine in Lynx and Links, but the menus are defined at the top of the page, meaning that you'll need to scroll multiple pages to get to the actual article.

If you have website, which have actual content (text), it's pretty easy to ensure that it looks good and works in Lynx, with minimal effort.

The Wiki has the answer:

  Unlike most web browsers, Lynx does not support JavaScript, which many websites require to work correctly.

elinks is another textmode web browser that supports some javascript. https://github.com/rkd77/elinks/