About 3 months ago Google became unusable when browsed through w3m: search results are not rendered as links, just as a regular text that can't be followed-through. They clearly assume you always browse with js enabled, I can't think of any other explanation.
My w3m installation didn't change in the last year or so. I also had opportunity to test this on various machines when needed to google random things in a hurry—it's consistently broken for me.
As for reproducability, in just this week I've seen two versions of image search page back and forth, with little visual changes here and there as well as CORS headers that break some bookmarklets that I occasionally use. I guess they're doing some A/B testing, or just roll out changes slowly.
I did some experiments the other day and found to my surprise that Google has by far the best no-Javascript experience of the major search engines. Duck Duck Go could learn a thing or two from them.
Google, the most popular page on the internet, doesn't force you to use Javascript.