"I don't see a reason to do special handling of people who disable javascript in their browsers these days."

Ironically enough, blind people who use screen readers might see a very good reason.

Non JS users are statistically more likely to be bots than blind, so I don't see why that should matter.

And anyway JAWS use IE to read the page for the user, so it does support javascript.

I happen to prefer the web in the main with JS turned off. I may be in a minority here, but surely it's not much effort to design with graceful degradation in mind?