I could make a car with wooden wheels too but since we have synthetic rubber it makes sense to use the best tool for the job.
Basic functionality that users expect from social media needs JavaScript. Endless scrolling is a simple example. Adding a comment reply or liking a post without reloading the page is another one.
A car with wooden wheels - as in the type used by Babylonians, not even the iron-rimmed wheels used by the Romans - would be suboptimal and not at all comparable to one running on rubber tyres. A site which does not depend on Javascript is not suboptimal, it is a local optimum which works best for many applications. Endless scrolling is a good example of how adding Javascript to a page can push it away from the local optimum which uses paging. While there are some areas where Javascript can be used to add actually useful features there are far more areas where adding Javascript makes the site less useable, more annoying, less responsive, less reliable and much heavier. That bit about using it to add comments without reloading the page is an interesting one since we're having a conversation on a Javascript-free social media site which reloads the page after every comment. It works just fine, doesn't it?
Is Craigslist unresponsive or heavy? It's using JS.
HN is a wonderful place but it’s a niche industry-only forum. The barebones nature of it works fine for the people here but products like Mastodon are attempting to be a much more broadly adopted general purpose product.
There are many reasons, from accessibility to security, performance to preference, why it is a reasonable expectation to be able to browse a web page without JS enabled.
JS can add to the core and turn paging into infinite scroll, or not require a page reload on an interaction but it should be enhancing, not fundamental. All core functionality should work without JS.
This was just a given for professionals in the industry less than a decade ago. The fact it isn’t anymore speaks loudly about the lack of mentoring and the low bar we have dropped to…
Those can be made to work just fine without using Javascript, that's what all those fancy tags are for after all.