This seems to me like someone realizing they've been using JS in really terrible ways and trying to stop that by just forcing themselves to not use JS at all. I

This seems to me like someone realizing they've been using JS in really terrible ways and trying to stop that by just forcing themselves to not use JS at all. It's not JS's fault that people use it in terrible ways. One page web apps aren't inherently bad, and neither are sites that don't use JS. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. You can write a bad site with JS you can write a bad site with no JS. I think the problem that this developer's "No JS" approach is forcing her to solve is the problem of not thinking through your architecture enough. By saying "I will not use JS", she is forcing herself to put more thought into how things are implemented and that's always going to result in something better than if you just slap something together. But I think it's a mistake to think that JS is the problem.