You gave up because the anti JavaScript position is completely insane and unreasonable?

The amount of work you have to put in to support a complete absence of JavaScript is more than 2x the original time spent on getting the site to work and it will lead to a heavily degraded user experience that nobody wants in the first place.

The amount of features locked behind JavaScript keep increasing. There are so many essential features that require JavaScript it is completely unreasonable to argue against them.