Simon (the founder & proprietor of The Aviation Herald) is an incredible force for good in the world. His work on that site, for well over a decade now, is legendary.
Fun fact: the response header [1] of that website suggests it is powered by Apache and Perl. Which is amazing in itself. And it's still responsive despite being #1 on HN.
Fancy JavaScript has nothing to do with serving static content. JavaScript itself is (or should be) static content anyway.
If you're talking about using JS to load content on page load, for whatever reason, that async content can also be static. For example some sites use the URL fragment (hash parameter) to load content, but the server does not receive this:
The fragment identifier functions differently to the rest of the URI: its processing is exclusively client-sided with no participation from the web server - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_fragment
> Fancy JavaScript has nothing to do with serving static content
Still, I visit websites all the time that don't work with Javascript disabled. They don't work at all, or the images don't load, or the formatting breaks down.
None of this is necessary. In principle, static content should work fine with Javascript disabled.
