So this is what I wonder, what would the world look like if JavaScript was never created?
It's fast.
It's more free from distractions.
It's accessible (plain text to copy-paste or feed a screen reader)
It's more secure.
It's limited.
The last of these is a bit obvious, and seems like a problem, until you try it and realise it's not. About 10% of websites will absolutely not run at all without JavaScript, and those seem to be the BigTech, low information density, low quality ones I can do without. So I take the "limitation"to be a feature, a free filter I get that weeds out a lot of the rubbish,
Once or twice a week there's about 0.5% of "essential" sites where I am effectively _forced_ to use JavaScript. For those I have a separate laptop.
But basically without JavaScript we would have used Java applets and the Java Virtual machine.
So your browser would actually be a hypervisor where each "tab" is actually a container for the JVM. An inside that container you could execute any language that compiles to the JVM. Different apps would run in it even a web browser would run on it!....
A little bit like what wasm is trying to accomplish now but 25 years earlier.