It's a blast. It's faster and way more resilient. No more state desync between frontend and backend.
I admit there is a minimum of javascript (currently a few hundred lines) for convenience.
I'll add a bit more to add the illusion this is still a SPA.
I'll kill about 40k lines of React that way and about 20k lines of Kotlin.
I'll have to rewrite about 30k lines of backend code though.
Still, I love it.
But if your site works fast. Loads fast. With _a little_ JS that actually improves the functionality+usability in? I think that's completely fine. Minimal JS for the win.
I want the basic functionality to work without JS.
But we have a working application and users are not hating it and used to it.
We rely on modals heavily. And for that I added (custom) JS. It's way simpler than alternatives and some things we do are not even possible without JS/WASM (via JS apis to manipulate the DOM) today.
I am pragmatic.
But as you mentioned it, personally I also use NoScript a lot and if a site refuses to load without JS it's a hard sell to me if I don't know it already.
1. filtering a drop down list by typing rather than scrolling through lots of options to pick one 2. Rearranging items with drag and drop
The excessive stuff is requiring a whole lot of scripts and resources to load before you display a simple page of information.
A better example would be dynamically loading the list of options where it is very long and loading the entire list would make the page size much larger.
In a huge majority of cases I come across that is on the server. Some things really are client-side only though, think temporary state responding to user interactions.
Either way I also try really hard to make sure the UI is at least functional without JS. There are times that isn't possible, but those are pretty rare in my experience.