The complaints about JS are almost never about the concept of a programming language that runs in your browser, and the upside you describe seems to apply to any language that runs in your browser.
I'm not talking about documents/articles that have useful embedded video, or informative interactive graphs and things.
I'm talking about "documents" that require a multiple javascript libraries to load in order to inject a "<p>Hello, it's a nice day and I had waffles for breakfast" into a DOM.
There is no "graceful degredation" with these things anymore; it's either javascript on, or no content, which is baffling and frustrating. It's not just a "get off my lawn" thing, it has real implications on energy efficiency, bandwidth, and most of all accessibility: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...
I mean, sure. But if our rubric is whether a technology being misused constitutes it having no business existing, that puts a shitload of tech on the chopping block.
> I'm talking about "documents" that require a multiple javascript libraries to load in order to inject a "<p>Hello, it's a nice day and I had waffles for breakfast" into a DOM.
You're misunderstanding the function. The function is not to distribute documents efficiently. The function is to place documents somewhere they can be distributed in such a way where the business majors can edit them without needing to pay a web developer to do it correctly. Hence the absolute plague of BMS systems, which are sold to the aforementioned manager/consultant vampire class so they can make the website pop and don't need to deal with a 20-something rolling their eyes at them when they ask for that.