Hmm. Sidebar is an example of a site that has no reason to use client-side scripting at all. It's a plain list of links, and yet doesn't work without Javascript, and is far, far slower than it should be.
Creator of Sidebar here. You're right, it's not the best showcase of Meteor. The reason it's this way is because it's running on a very old fork of Telescope (http://telescopeapp.org), and I haven't had time to update it.
But you make some good points. Meteor is not for everything, and if I had known from the start that Sidebar would end up being just a list of links I might have used a different stack (like Rails, or even a static site generator).