It's not a complete replacement, though. For example, a couple of months ago we had a discussion about websites scanning local ports, prompted by [1]. This can in fact be done without Javascript, in which case uMatrix would still protect you, whereas NoScript would not.
The <img> won't be requested until the stylesheet has failed to load, which takes a different amount of time depending on whether there was something listening on that port, or not.
uMatrix won't allow the request to the local machine to go through.
[1] https://nullsweep.com/why-is-this-website-port-scanning-me/