"Flash never really was a problem for me; very very few used it for anything critical."
Actually there was a period (end of the 90s, early 2000s) where flash was pervasively used to build entire sites. They were worse than single pages app of today. Completely broke browser history, urls etc... Those are similar complaints to today but now that APIs and workaround exit, it's mostly laziness that prevent people from properly building apps that avoid these pitfalls.
"And frankly the "best viewed in whatever" websites weren't a problem either".
There were days where not having a windows machine with IE installed meant not being able to bank online, access university course website etc... This is no longer an issue that I run into much in 2016.
"Living with JS (and other obnoxious features) disabled, on the other hand, has gotten really fucking difficult now."
That used to be the case too with Flash (and java to a smaller extent). Without flash many many sites were completely broken. This obviously got better with time to the point where it's hard to remember but it was pretty horrible to try to use the web without flash circa 2000-2006 or so.
I get that some want JS disabled but it's the only cross browser method of achieving certain interactive experiences on the web. It's not new technology and has been around since the earliest days of the web. The percentage of people with JS disabled is so low (less than 1% in sites on many sites I've dealt with) that it was very hard to justify the added effort to support both (in the case of the sites I worked on, they were large enough that the effort was made). As the web becomes used for more and more use cases, it's going to be hard to keep accommodating a very small minority of users. If JS wasn't there, something else would have to exist to do what it does.
Actually there was a period (end of the 90s, early 2000s) where flash was pervasively used to build entire sites. They were worse than single pages app of today. Completely broke browser history, urls etc... Those are similar complaints to today but now that APIs and workaround exit, it's mostly laziness that prevent people from properly building apps that avoid these pitfalls.
"And frankly the "best viewed in whatever" websites weren't a problem either".
There were days where not having a windows machine with IE installed meant not being able to bank online, access university course website etc... This is no longer an issue that I run into much in 2016.
"Living with JS (and other obnoxious features) disabled, on the other hand, has gotten really fucking difficult now."
That used to be the case too with Flash (and java to a smaller extent). Without flash many many sites were completely broken. This obviously got better with time to the point where it's hard to remember but it was pretty horrible to try to use the web without flash circa 2000-2006 or so.
I get that some want JS disabled but it's the only cross browser method of achieving certain interactive experiences on the web. It's not new technology and has been around since the earliest days of the web. The percentage of people with JS disabled is so low (less than 1% in sites on many sites I've dealt with) that it was very hard to justify the added effort to support both (in the case of the sites I worked on, they were large enough that the effort was made). As the web becomes used for more and more use cases, it's going to be hard to keep accommodating a very small minority of users. If JS wasn't there, something else would have to exist to do what it does.