And without JS you don't get real applications on the web. Dumb text is fine for web 1.0, 2.0, but modern web applications are expanding far beyond that. Are there ways to be abusive with JS? Sure. But JS is what enables web applications as opposed to just having text-on-page (newspaper 2.0).
This is simply not true. Ignoring the fact that "real application on the web" has no definition... very useful web pages can be created without JavaScript, and they can (quite easily) interact with the user by taking input and updating what they display.
Why is something like that useful? Accessibility, security, backward compatibility, ...
