I find that "progressive enhancement", while perhaps a bit more work, results in a more robust and maintainable webapp. The fact that results in pages that work

I find that "progressive enhancement", while perhaps a bit more work, results in a more robust and maintainable webapp. The fact that results in pages that work without JS is almost a side-effect and barely needs to be tested. The point for me is that links behave like links (perform GET requests against a URL and change the page from one state to another), buttons behave like buttons (perform POST requests and update some internal state), and the effect they have on the page is much the same with or without Javascript. The only difference is that with Javascript I can intercept the action and make the state change a lot more streamlined, or add a fancy animation if I so desire. By simply intercepting buttons and links (similar to how pjax and turbolinks work) I don't have to dig through JS to find where a specific AJAX request is fired-off and what it does. It just works, and when it returns, it simply updates part or all of the page with whatever the server returned, which could be part or all of a page. There are, of course, obvious limitations, like local state that changes with user interaction but that isn't preserved on the server in any way. But the more I can get working without Javascript, the more I know will be easily maintainable and translatable going forward even if I do something crazy like get rid of jQuery or convert everything to a React app. Maybe I'm just a bit odd, but I find this approach a lot easier to manage and a lot more productive in the long run than in marrying myself to any particular client-side framework.