Every time I use Tor, I appreciate your viewpoint. But trying to pretend that most developers are better off spending their time maintaining a separate renderer for a few edge case users is not really reflective of reality.

I've worked on more "web apps" than I can count and the reality is, only 2 of them were legitimate use cases for a pure JS solution. And we gain nothing from it. I've just spent all morning debugging an issue with a complicated angular directive (and not for the first time) that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago. Probably because a bored dev wanted to play with a new toy.

As you imply, we were writing sophisticated web apps long before AJAX was popularised and those apps were way more reliable and predictable than what we have now, and they worked in Lynx if you wanted.