Seems kind of silly to ignore that javascript enables much more robust user interfaces. It can and is used poorly or maliciously, but it's used for far more than cosmetic or financial reasons.
I once had a site beg me to enable JS "for a better user experience", one which didn't need it to work. I did, and promptly turned it off again when I realised what the "better" actually meant (see above). Not going to fall for that one again...
Yet for some reason (hint: money) newspaper websites load megabytes worth of scripts to display kilobytes of text.