This is the 'no true Scotsman' argument.

"Websites that use JS are terrible and broken."

"Your website uses a ton of JS."

"JS is fine in my case. It's all those other websites that are broken!"

You can implement a captcha without JS. You don't need jQuery or jQuery-migrate in 2025. The site is using Quill for some typography tweaks that could mostly be done in CSS.

FWIW I don't think there's anything wrong with the way the site is built. It looks nice. It loads pretty fast. JS is great - it enables a bunch of capabilities for things that you can't do on a web page without it, and if you're looking for something very specific or hugely interactive it's essential. But I can make that argument because I'm not saying JS is bad. If you say JS is bad and you use it anyway for things you don't really need you're undermining your own point quite a lot.

I think you're stuck with jquery because of the theme engine and the comment section.

No true Scotsman would ever use Javascript… I guess I need to buy a kilt!

Absolutely, do as I say not as I do.

They do complain about wordpress using js... And the javascript files are rather tiny other than jQuery and recaptcha which is loaded by the comment section.

I do want HCL so we can sunset helm since it really is not the tool for the job (and slow).

I think it's loaded by the comment section.