There's an informative talk by Alice Bartlett, a front-end developer at gov.uk (the UK government digital service) on Youtube. In the presentation, she states that two of the requirements for gov.uk are
1. Functional without Javascript
2. Functional in IE7+
The essential point made is that for much of gov.uk, it isn't that difficult to make the site work without Javascript or work in IE7 either.
Purley personal opinion, but web design has become incredibly bloated with so much cruft added to web pages - be it unnecesary Javascript or excess CSS. Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.
Heavy use of client side methods seems to break a lot of the benefits of using web apps in the first place. A main advantage of web apps originally was that they worked more or less the same on any machine. That Google Maps worked in exactly the same way regardless of how good your machine was at vector rendering. I wonder if the aversion to maintaining state on the server needs to end. You could do almost anything that a modern web app does with minimal client side code and have performance on low end PCs.
And also http://youtu.be/CUkMCQR4TpY?t=19m21s
The essential point made is that for much of gov.uk, it isn't that difficult to make the site work without Javascript or work in IE7 either.
Purley personal opinion, but web design has become incredibly bloated with so much cruft added to web pages - be it unnecesary Javascript or excess CSS. Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.