[Nemo157]

JS being required for the interactive features would be fine. My personal problem is that I end up on some random gitlab instance to just take a look at the source or issues for some library, and get a blank white page. For the read-only public view there should be no need for any JS.

[joshstrange]

I understand that thinking but it's ignores reality. To do what you want you want means maintaining 2 codebases (even if just for sub-parts of a site). It's really easy to say "This specific page could be static" and you are right, it could, but it would mean having fallbacks for every JS interaction on the page (or removing them if the user has JS disabled). There simply aren't enough people who die on the no-JS hill to care about, especially since it means ongoing development maintenance, testing, design/UI work, and the list goes on.

[nyanpasu64]

GitLab is built on JS and renders a white screen without JS. Enabling JS at all taxes my Core 2 Duo machine, and opening GitLab to a few thousand line file (or worse yet, opening the pull request diff view) taxes my top-of-the-line Ryzen 5 5600X machine running Firefox. GitLab is just badly written.

[doodlesdev]

Or you could server render the pages and hydrate them as needed which is something easy to do with NextJS, NuxtJS, Remix, Fresh, among other modern frameworks for developing with JavaScripts libs.

[zzo38computer]

This is my opinion, too. The JavaScripts should not be required just to read the documents, files, list of files, etc; even if some of the other features do use it.