This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.
I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)
Then how the fuck am I reading this let alone replying?
A small correction: some parts of the new web require JavaScript to render.
That's why on many websites teh experience is better without JS. To be more specific, several paywalled websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is being used to prevent text rendering.
It's especially nice to have JavaScript disabled by default, so I can enable one script at a time until it becomes readable. But not so many scripts that it becomes unreadable again.
I get your sentiment but at some point you have to let go. Many websites die every day not because of obsolescence but because the author eventually stops renewing the domain or paying their hosting provider.
It's just a part of life.
openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp
Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.