Excepting people who intentionally disable Javascript (I've made my opinion of doing that clear), in what context is a no-javascript experience relevant to any significantly sized group of people today? And if there is no such significantly sized group of people, why do we even care what the degraded experience would be?

Accessibility.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

That's a good thing for a web developer to consider, but javascript does not automatically impact accessibility, design does. Screen readers rely on the rendered HTML after javascript is done with it, not the source, and javascript-triggered dialog boxes are perfectly compatible with them (reading out things like confirmation dialogs is one of the easiest things for them to do).