I tried this but I found a lot of vile websites these days load the actual article with JS
Yeah, I've noticed too. A surprising amount of the web works fine with most scripts blocked, but if I open an article and it's a blank page, chances are I'm just clicking back.
That precludes them from indexing the article in search engines, so thankfully it’s not as popular as it otherwise would be
Not really, some of them will serve the plaintext if you are Google
I have a chrome extension that allows me to toggle on/off as needed. I'm not advocating leaving it off, that breaks a lot of sites.