The kind of people who tend to want a separate, simpler alternative web are almost universally also the kind of people who are so allergic to javascript that they don't even want it to be an option, on the remote chance they might encounter it in the wild. They're drawn by a combination of nostalgia and spite to manifest an alternate universe where scripting on the web never even happened. Otherwise, sure, they could just write simple HTML and no javascript on the web we have now.
I personally would like to retry a version of the script tag (possibly more like the object tag) with native support for WASM that would make it easy to run scripts in any language... which is closer to the original vision before Javascript "won," and possible without requiring browsers to support the languages. Also maybe things like an <include> tag for HTML, and other things that fell by the wayside of early HTML. I'd like to see something like HolyC, with native support for text, hypertext, drawing and code.
But 99.9% of people seem to just want a web that's basically whitepapers with links, maybe images.