We said exactly the same things about Flash not so many years ago, including the pretentious dismissal of anyone who would dare not support the technology we wanted to use. Before that (and to some extent even now) it was operating systems: what kind of hippie doesn't run Windows, after all? It's pretty easy to justify technical decisions by pigeonholing anyone not using our same platform as The Kind Of People who we don't want giving us money anyway.

There are quite a few comments here complaining about the gaudy unusable interface produced by "modern JavaScript-based techniques", which in this case appear to provide virtually nothing that static HTML and CSS can't do. The dev team was lazy and wanted to show off, and screw anyone who doesn't think running gobs of arbitrary code should be a necessity for buying a ticket.

And for what it's worth my non-developer artist girlfriend has been using noscript for longer than I have. I'll let her know what modern devs think of her, though I don't think she's heard of wget.