For me there's a sweet spot for software where you get something that's lightweight and configurable but still comes with features that are considered essential. Browsers without tabs or bookmarks don't tick the last box, something like qutebrowser does. In other words, I dislike bloat but I don't hate it to a degree where I'm willing to switch to something more limited just because it has fewer lines of code.

And JS may not be necessary and I wish that it would be used much less(if at all). But JS won't go away for some time and I still want to be able to use most websites. So I run a browser that supports JS and block everything I find too annoying.