Even without any features enabled and not sending any headers, fingerprinting would let the server track what pages you visit and when (even across websites).

Even without any features enabled and not sending any headers, fingerprinting would let the server track what pages you visit and when (even across websites). There's not much they'd do with that information (as you say, while it's technically possible, no one cares enough to make an advertising system that works without JavaScript). The main use case would probably be a primitive way to track which pages are visited in which order, how popular various links are, which paths people took to get to a specific page, etc. Normal tracking stuff which I don't personally have a problem with, but privacy activists often tend to.