My love of a paycheck drives me to give deference to the new normal. Meanwhile real desktop programs are still way more pleasant to use and way more respectful of my system resources, and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

> and low- or no-JS websites are still mostly nicer to use and better performing than JS heavy ones.

I dunno, there are some pretty egregious examples of this being false though. gmail is one such example. I remember using webmail in the days where every action was a full page load -- and we had slower connections then too, which made it hurt even more. Then gmail came out and blew everybody away with its response times. A well thought out AJAX solution could give you minimal load times for data. The issue lately is when the JS code is too big, not well tuned, and gives the equivalent of several 90s-era-website-full-pageloads worth of data with every action. That is to say a lot of websites aren't as lean as they could be.

I'm not a web focused person so somebody correct me if I'm wrong, this is my outsider's perspective.

“AJAX” when it was mostly grabbing chunks of HTML to insert or otherwise not doing much but “grab, render” was sometimes faster. Not so much these days.