From my experience with NoScript, quite the opposite: no annoying video popups (yes, yes, technically it's a full-page DIV nowadays), no animated nonsense.

And in cases where JS is required for the page to work, I enable it with two clicks.

I have a similar set up with NoScript. On most sites if I don't see anything I enable it for the main domain and a CDN one if I can see it. If it still doesn't load and especially if it requests JS from more than four or five domains I often leave the site at that point.

The number of sites pulling Javascript from 10+ domains (and therefore letting all those track me, inject code into the site etc.) is pretty high and at least with NoScript I know who is doing stuff to me.

Since I've installed NoScript and started using it in similar way as parent described, my web browsing experience improved a lot.

Now I only need something similar and easy to use for mobile browsers.