Nonsense. This is definitively YAGNI. Good engineering is accommodating the greatest number of people with the resources you have in the least amount of time. Thinking about some abstract future scenario is categorically not good engineering.
Case in point: car seatbelts and airbags. Most people don't crash, right? But you aren't seeing the car manufacturers remove seatbelts and airbags.
Statistical averages are a back-patting technique between managers, let's face that reality, shall we? They very rarely have the customer's interests in mind.
Again, let's face it -- it's bean counting, some medium-level product manager wants a raise by saving expenses.
That's all it is, that's all it ever was, and it ain't ever gonna change while there are people on these positions.
I think I understand where my opponents stand, but I disagree with a part of them.
The same sort of consumer expectation doesn't exist for no-javascript. Major browsers default it enabled. The web has developed to be seriously built on top of javascript for the last 15 years. Consumers have expectations for how the web should work in 2017 (for better or worse) and no-javascript isn't anywhere on the radar.
Consumer expect cars to have airbags and seatbelts, consumers expect websites to behave as they always have and that means javascript.
If there's no soft solution, disabling JS altogether is a good fish net for a lot of people -- yes the percent is close to a rounding error but the absolute amount can go to 1 million or more.
As any good civil engineer knows... “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
The essential characteristic of engineering is making mindful, appropriate tradeoffs between various costs and benefits, including features, risks, externalities, financial costs, etc.
The corner-cutting in the current tech culture is a bit too much for my taste.