Yeah I'm never going to make the argument that HTML alone is adequate in most cases. Light JS, like as you said was featured on most sites of that era, is perfectly fine since the utility added is significant and the drawbacks very minimal. Same goes for images… highly optimized small PNG glyphs and small JPEGs are fine, you only start getting into trouble when loading multiple megabytes of images for purely ornamental purposes. My single core G5 and P4 machines handled such sites with ease, even with the (relative to now) badly optimized web engines of the 00s.
Problem is, light JS and small/optimized images are becoming more the exception than the rule. When devs have ample bandwidth and powerful machines they're much less likely to carefully weigh every dependency and unnecessarily large image.
Problem is, light JS and small/optimized images are becoming more the exception than the rule. When devs have ample bandwidth and powerful machines they're much less likely to carefully weigh every dependency and unnecessarily large image.