Unfortunately, modern website functionality is totally inseparable from all the things which make modern websites terrible. Losing functionality is the best solution here, as it trains you not to rely on unnecessarily complicate web apps.

I find that most useful websites work well without JS, and the exceptions can be whitelisted.

I don't know for how long this will remain true, given the number of web developers whose talks are how to optimise fifty bajillion layers of abstraction so that they can load the JS needed for a form button click before anything else… instead of just using what's built directly into the pre-JS HTML standard.

*old man shakes fist as The Cloud*

Most content websites work completely fine with JS disabled. There’s a certain sort of startup landing page that’s very commonly broken, but on general content pages it’s definitely uncommon. Though blank pages still aren’t as rare as they should be.

Source: I’ve disabled JS by default for I think three years now, and hold that it generally improves the web.

My technique is to disable JS via uMatrix, but don’t enable that extension in Private Browsing windows, and so just open briefly in Private Browsing if a page that I want to see is broken. I find this a pretty decent balance for ease of use.

honestly I browse without JS enabled most of the time and most websites not only work just fine (to the extent that they show the content I requested), but they also load faster, look cleaner, and the overall experience is a huge improvement. Considering that in the rare cases where it doesn't work it's just a couple of clicks to selectively allow JS (which can be remembered so I only need to do this one time) or to re-enable JS globally it's really not a problem.

It'll depend somewhat on what you use the internet for I guess, but it doesn't make the internet broken by any means. Because of the work I do I've got a ton of other things disabled too which can make it harder than it would be for most people and it still usually isn't an issue. I also keep a non-hardened browser around for cases where it really is a problem, but I rarely need it.