HTML is often not flexible or capable enough. JS exists for a reason, and is an integral part of the web. Without it, you will struggle to express certain things online and lean JS sites can be really quite nice to use (and are generally indexed well by Google).
Bloated JS sites are a horrible thing, but they almost sideline themselves. I rarely visit a bloated site after an initial bad experience, unless I'm forced.
For documents, you can absolutely have all the structured content in HTML, and add JS to improve things. This way, you have your feature rich experience, the bot can build its indexing without having to run this extra js, and I have my lightweight experience.
Bloated JS sites are a horrible thing, but they almost sideline themselves. I rarely visit a bloated site after an initial bad experience, unless I'm forced.