i absolutely hate how the modern web just fails to load if one has javascript turned off. i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on. it’s not a hard concept, people.
but you ask candidates to explain “graceful degradation” and they’ll sit and look at you with a blank stare.
sure, it’s painful and pointless to build a fucking virtual machine without JS, but you can do 95% of normal website things with pretty bog standard HTML+CSS these days. You don’t even have to fiddle about to do pretty complex things, that’s just built-in most of the time.