We should simply not support developers that re-implement links, buttons, and text boxes entirely in Javascript. Such false elements lack inbuilt functionality (particularly with regards to accessibility), and are slower.

For some people, it's about not breaking the web platform in ways that require JavaScript. For example, without JavaScript, links have predictable behavior. With it, you have link shaped buttons that can do anything and that often break when you try to do things the author didn't anticipate, like opening a link in a new tab.

Requiring JS (and especially if you trendchase the latest "modern" crap) is essentially advocating for keeping Big Browser's monopoly and effective control intact.

We should simply not support websites that download huge arbitrary programs from a huge number of arbitrary third party domains just to retrieve bit by bit what is in the end a static website and reimplement all kinds of standardized browser features in a non standard way that makes a huge number of assumptions and only targets a subset of people with specific browsers with specific settings using specific input devices in a specific way and just break that functionality for everyone else making the open web very closed by enforcing clients behave and be used in a certain pre approved way, breaking accessibility and crippling all kinds of browser features often with disregard and often with intention.

It's my device and I should get to decide what code I run in it, what software I use, how that software displays content to me and how I interact with it.

On the contrary, I don't get why (certain) sites - and people - absolutely insist on serving even the most basic things via copious amounts of JavaScript, and other adjacent technologies. Most website content is basic multimedia, text, images and video, and most use of JavaScript is either frivolous or is supporting user-hostile designs, such as infinite scroll.

Reminds me to the WordPress / PHP scourge of the 2010s. "You don't understand, we have to dynamically serve our site using PHP, and have an extensive CMS that we can barely use ourselves so we'll will still constantly reach out to you about." And then the site is barely more than a brochure or a blog.

Correct. As an HN commentator put it in 2023:

“[Progressive enhancement] was just an idea by a few niche people who wanted to disable 1/3 to 2/3 of their browser's technology then demand that web-site operators/builders spend a lot of time and money on implementing for that sub-1% population. They didn't, and these people had no real leverage.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779408