i absolutely hate how the modern web just fails to load if one has javascript turned off. i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on. it’s not a hard concept, people.
but you ask candidates to explain “graceful degradation” and they’ll sit and look at you with a blank stare.
How about serving a proper HTML that contains the data they want to display? Instead of an empty page that tries to load the data via JavaScript.
They could just add a text box that says please enable JavaScript.
I miss when JS was just a silly thing you could use to add trails to the mouse cursor to impress anyone who stumbled onto your geocities page