[3xblah]

"... as intended."

There's the catch. The web developer's intent does not necessarily align with the user's. The developer wants to use Javascript. What does the user want?

The simple example is a website that just delivers information.

The user just wants the information as quickly and easily as possible. She does not care whether Javascript is used to deliver it.

She does care however if the delivery is more resource-intensive and slower.

[RussianCow]

But if the website requires JS to even load the content, then it doesn't matter what the user's intent is. And it's easy to say "just close the tab" until you really need that content.

[egdod]

It’s also easy to enable it for that one interaction.

[RussianCow]

This sounds great in theory, but I tried this for a while and got really frustrated at just how often I had to enable JS for a specific site/page because it was broken, sometimes in non-obvious ways (e.g. some interactions work but others rely on JS). For me at least, it wasn't worth it, but YMMV depending on how you use the web and your tolerance for this kind of thing.