Ok, I understand privacy concerns, but this is simply insane.

At the modern day and age, anything even slightly scalable operates on JS.
Any web app is running on JS.
Those "half the sites on the internet" that are unusable without JS? Those are basically all the sites except for a few walking dinosaurs, and a ton of landing pages and similar static content.
Sorry, as much as I dislike the fact, the web is no longer usable without JS. Moreover, there are countless more grave privacy concerns on other layers, such as the ISP, or your data being tracked and distributed via seemingly unrelated sites.
Asking to sacrifice JS now is the same as asking countries to waste billions to "help combat climate change" when not only would it cripple their economy, but in fact even if they reduced their pollution to zero, the reduction would still be a drop in a bucket compared to China/India, thus insignificant on a global scale.