The problem isn't that the website is not HTML-only, but rather that it is JavaScript-only (practically-speaking). If you're using NoScript, or otherwise have JavaScript disabled, you get an empty page with nothing but an error message.
At least we had nitter for viewing tweets without the need to allow JS. AFAIK there's no nitter for mastodon (nastodon?) although you can get some data by looking at the RSS feed.
I use nitter a lot now that most links on the Internet are to tweets. It provides an experience vastly superior to that of actual Twitter. It takes Twitter from an unreadable cesspool to a readable cesspool.
