There are a lot of web sites which will not work without JavaScript. I am not sure why so many people do not like JavaScript but it seems to work well.
The other reason Google will always support JavaScript on web sites is because advertisers (including Google) use it. In fact, I suspect one of the motivations for improving Chrome's JavaScript performance was to make ads work better (i.e. allow ads to run more complex scripts to improve ad targeting, and fight ad fraud).
Do those sites need to be indexed, though? Web applications? Games? What is lost if a newspaper's animated pie charts are not indexed for search? I see more assertions in this thread that some websites need javascript, but does the javascript mediated content really add something for search? And if it does, is it perhaps content that actually ought not to have been mediated by js?
> I am not sure why so many people do not like JavaScript but it seems to work well.
"the dose makes the poison" springs to mind: some interactivity or XHR is often a win for UX, but it also opens up negligent actor's ability to completely torpedo a site for any number of silly reasons. Take the most common thing one wishes to use a web browser for: reading content. Clicking on a link and staring at a blank page because 85mb of JS is still loading, and when it does load it makes swooshing things that hijack the scroll behavior is very likely why so many people do not like JavaScript
