I'm with you 100%, virtually nobody will take the time to code against a fallback profile like that. That's why most sites tend not to work without JavaScript regardless of whether their functionality strictly requires it.

Support for images concern many of us for that reason: sure it seems nice for a few cases used judiciously. But it feels counter-productive to the strengths of the CLI.

I would feel that way about curses/cli-based-gui too in theory, but in practice it's just top, vim, and less for the most part. Maybe I'm just too scared.