Yes, of course, you are right. And that is what I would do. And actually what I did do. Recently made a JS-free personal website, still fully responsive and has some foldable content and so on.
However, people at $job would not listen to me, when I said, that it could be done without jumping on the React hype train and went ahead with React and a framework based on React, to make a single page app, completely unnecessary and occupying multiple frontend devs fulltime with that, instead of simply using a traditional web framework with a templating engine and knowledge about HTML and CSS. So I am no longer in that role to make some as-little-as-possible-JS thing happen. I was a fullstack developer, but I don't want to deal with the madness, so I withdrew from the frontend part.
See, I don't have a problem with doing this. It is just that people think they need a "modern web framework" and single page apps and whatnot, when they actually don't and have very limited interactive widgets on their pages and have rather pages of informational nature. Then comes the router update taking 2 weeks, or a framework update taking 2-3 weeks, or new TS version being targeted... Frequent work, that wouldn't even exist with a simpler approach.
However, people at $job would not listen to me, when I said, that it could be done without jumping on the React hype train and went ahead with React and a framework based on React, to make a single page app, completely unnecessary and occupying multiple frontend devs fulltime with that, instead of simply using a traditional web framework with a templating engine and knowledge about HTML and CSS. So I am no longer in that role to make some as-little-as-possible-JS thing happen. I was a fullstack developer, but I don't want to deal with the madness, so I withdrew from the frontend part.
See, I don't have a problem with doing this. It is just that people think they need a "modern web framework" and single page apps and whatnot, when they actually don't and have very limited interactive widgets on their pages and have rather pages of informational nature. Then comes the router update taking 2 weeks, or a framework update taking 2-3 weeks, or new TS version being targeted... Frequent work, that wouldn't even exist with a simpler approach.