You are free to disable it as a very small minority.

The web is not a static document viewing anymore. Now I agree, that sites should have a static fallback, as I also do not want to run a full webapp, when all I want is a static article for example. But this is because of a different problem - the financing of most of the web, through advertisment and not the fault of javascript.

Much like frames, iframes and window.open are really useful features... advertisers and abusers made it bad. I remember the first time I saw a popup in the 90's, my first thought was, "oh this is going to get bad." And I would never buy a product from X10.