Most "basic" autocomplete isn't all that dynamic and you can prepopulate on the server side reasonably well. Sure, you still need JS to fetch a dynamic changin

Most "basic" autocomplete isn't all that dynamic and you can prepopulate on the server side reasonably well. Sure, you still need JS to fetch a dynamic changing list, but you can also just update datalist options elements with JS rather than implement a full separate UX for autocomplete today. You are limited in the ability to CSS style datalist options so a lot of developers are still going to feel pressure in 2023 from "pixel perfect" UX designers to continue to reimplement that wheel, but the version of the JS that just updates a datalist after a fetch is likely much simpler than building a full "autocomplete control".