Not in practice, given that in reality of this use case, JS code also does network requests, which tend to be at least as slow as downloading a HTML page.
That said, what I meant is modern JS enabled moving into the web things that should have stayed local. It's literally two step backwards (moving software into "the cloud") and one step forward (giving back some responsiveness through AJAX).
Most of the time when you put JS on your page, what you're doing is breaking the thing that would - without JS - still correctly do what it's actually supposed to do.
While I generally agree with the sentiment of "do more by coding less", and minimalist user interfaces, there are plenty of cases where you throw a whole lot of functionality out the window by outright banning JS.
That said, what I meant is modern JS enabled moving into the web things that should have stayed local. It's literally two step backwards (moving software into "the cloud") and one step forward (giving back some responsiveness through AJAX).