From a comment by Jon Hobbs:
Web developers need to stop wasting their time pandering to a tiny proportion of internet users and help to push the web forward by making the web a bad place to be if you use "old IE" or have javascript switched off.
Using the web in 2013 means using javascript.
My rule of thumb for this stuff: a content-rich site (like this one) shouldn't rely on JavaScript, where an application absolutely should. I use Pocket, for example, and articles would be hard to parse if JavaScript did heavy lifting.
The replies to the comment are worth reading -- lots of different (and valid) opinions.