The best way to avoid writing JS UIs is to invent a time machine and kill Brendan Eich before he puts it in Netscape. People prefer the interactivity that it enables, and no amount of server-side architecture is going to replace that.
I should have said write less JavaScript, not avoid. Still, the tradeoffs of interactivity and client-side architecture required to keep it sane seems like an ok discussion to have.
While this is probably true, I think this argument is used to defend things that could totally be handled without any (or with very minimal) javascript. Turbolinks or Pjax will get you most of the way toward the interactivity people are used to with single page JS apps. Of course there are interactions that necessitate more Javascript. In my experience, those cases are the exception, not the rule.
