> I agree that a news website does not need to have JS-required pages for 99.999%+ of their content.
I've seen this idea a number of times in this thread, it's far from true. The majority of advertising systems require JS. Without advertising, the news site has no income. As a result the internal discussion is going to be more like 'why waste any time at all to support the ~1% of users who will never generate any revenue'.
You can still show ads with JS disabled at least some of the ads systems I have used have <noscript> tags following the JS include to show something still if JS is disabled. It's far less targeted for sure which in turn leads to less revenue from them. And I think it's fair for a free resource (This does not hold for news sites behind a paywall) to require JS so that they can make money off ads to in turn support the free viewing.
I've seen this idea a number of times in this thread, it's far from true. The majority of advertising systems require JS. Without advertising, the news site has no income. As a result the internal discussion is going to be more like 'why waste any time at all to support the ~1% of users who will never generate any revenue'.