The better advice is imo to keep your browser up-to-date. JS exploits have been come increasingly rare these days, mostly due to Chrome's excellent example of patching quickly and paying good money for exploits (e.g. Pwn2Own). JS 0days are imo far too valuable now to waste them on normal users. So no, disabling JS wouldn't make much sense, if your have an evergreen browser.
Disable Flash & Java and try to minimize downloads is the security advice I give nowadays. Also don't install anything unless you absolutely have to (there are plenty of good in-browser options for programs we used to install, e.g. for file conversion).
JS is not the only attack surface in a browser. There have been exploitable bugs in image parsers, font renderers, etc. Tracking is possible without JS as well.
I used to do this on linux, as I had copies of my windows VM and I would just browse from the windows box on another screen and then work from the linux one on the main screen
Or better still noScript blocks all js by default and you only whitelist the sites you trust. Throw in a Ghostery for cookies and you are reasonably good to go.