In the days since 1 GHz CPUs, web pages have also grown from simple HTML/CSS to huge JavaScript frameworks, in which displaying the simplest static content requires a ton of JavaScript.
But if you install a browser add-on such as uMatrix, you can see that surprisingly many web sites will still work just fine if you disable JavaScript (even first-party JavaScript). One example is nytimes.com.
Should mention that megabytes of javascripts are slow to download, compile and execute. While a few seconds may go unnoticed on the developer desktops, it will be a lot more on a mobile or laptop.
But if you install a browser add-on such as uMatrix, you can see that surprisingly many web sites will still work just fine if you disable JavaScript (even first-party JavaScript). One example is nytimes.com.