For users, there are technical measures that are/could be implemented in the browser. White lists are inconvenient but their inconvenience is to be weighted against the scripting inconvenience. Also sandboxing.
With an easy and friendly interface, a growing number of people would turn to disable JS to browse all but their favourite sites. Attracting users (and thus making them white-list you) could be an incentive to develop accesible welcoming front pages.
That would press commercial sites more like apps and would des-incentivize personal or non-profit pages to be heavy.
So I believe there're ways to resolve tension, it depends on how inconvenient and unsafe web scripting becomes.
(Many/most) Web users just want to "read a goddam text document".
This tension is unlikely to be resolved.
Of course, some useful things on the web truly are 'apps'. Text isn't, and probably never will be.