This exactly, sometimes you have to use something not because it is the best option, but because it is what your team is using, or because the ease of use is worth the performance drawbacks.
It really doesn't seem like there is anything you can do. Sure you can talk to your representative, but why are they going to bother dealing with something that such a small margin of their voters care about?
While I agree with you that most if not all sites should offer some sort of no JavaScript fallback, the development resources required to offer such a thing is just generally unpractical when it's such a small minority of users. Government or not, they still have to choose between spending their limited departmental resources on an extremely small minority, or the greater userbase as a whole.
> the development resources required to offer such a thing is just generally unpractical
Yeah, iSnow made the same point, but it doesn't scan. "Boss, I can make it work w/o JS but it will cost more..." Huh? Doesn't that sound just like what an unprofessional developer would say?
The fact that so many popular JS frameworks don't do the right thing is part of the JS abuse in my opinion (same goes for accessibility.) Lazy developers wrote half-assed frameworks and other lazy developers chose to use them and then people start to believe that adding JS somehow makes it hard or expensive to do without JS when really they are just doing it wrong in the first place.
> when it's such a small minority of users.
The population of the US is just under 330M, so if, say, 0.5% can't or won't run JS to interact with taxpayer-funded government services that's about 1.5M people. Those folks (of whom I am one) should not be disenfranchised, so to speak, because the gov hired unprofessional developers. The government shouldn't do that, and they certainly shouldn't try to tell me that I'm some out-of-date digital neanderthal for caring enough about web insecurity to disable JS, eh? Lousy devs (as demonstrated by the fact that they can't provide a non-JS web experience/fallbacks at an affordable rate) are precisely the ones the JS code of whom I have no wish to run, and I certainly don't want my tax dollars going to pay them to screw me out of access to the service also paid for by my tax dollars.
> choose between spending their limited departmental resources on an extremely small minority, or the greater userbase as a whole.
Or they could use tech that works for everybody automatically for the same cost, eh?
Disabled users don't get a choice, that's their lives. People who voluntarily disable a core browser component do. Apples and oranges. You should (and legally need to) worry about accessibility.
When I can't access the page content I read the page source. Disabled users can do the same. There are other workarounds like graphic captcha solvers. There's nothing unsolvable about accessibility, it's just annoying.
Types, I never could stand them. I started out programming C++ for tiny side projects, eventually moving to python2 for a majority of my projects until I got into a programming class in my highschool and was taught java, and I hated java as soon as I touched it. Java's type system was gross to me, I never really got advanced enough in C++ to use types much and python has no type so I just assumed java was an outlier and types where a stupid addition by it. I continued to believe this even once I got a job in node, until I used typescript. Actually seeing why you would want a static typing system, and being old enough to appreciate the structure they provided changed me, would hardly consider using a dynamically typed language for even a reasonably sized project now.
