You’re correct, and I’m going to explain how this happens. I’m not justifying that it happens, just explaining it.

It isn’t that no one knows what graceful degradation is anymore. It’s that they don’t try to serve every browser that’s existed since the beginning of time.

When you develop software, you have to make some choices about what clients you’re going to support, because you then need to test for all those clients to ensure you haven’t broken their experience.

With ever-increasing demands for more and more software delivery to drive ever greater business results, developers want to serve as few clients as possible. And they know exactly what clients their audience use - this is easy to see and log.

This leads to conversations like: can we drop browser version X? It represents 0.4% of our audience but takes the same 10% of our testing effort as the top browser.”

And of course the business heads making the demands on their time say yes, because they don’t want to slow down new projects by 10% over 0.4% of TAM. The developers are happy because it’s less work for them and fewer bizarre bugs to deal with from antiquated software.

Not one person in this picture will fight for your right to turn off JavaScript just because you have some philosophy against it. It’s really no longer the “scripting language for animations and interactivity” on top of HTML like it used to be. It’s the entire application now. 🤷‍♂️

If it helps you to blame the greedy corporate masters who want to squeeze more productivity out of their engineering group, then think that. It’s true. But it’s also true that engineers don’t want to work with yesteryear’s tech or obscure client cases, because that experience isn’t valuable for their career.