That’s good advice, but I beg to differ about the perspective on browsers.

There are a very few browsers that only render content. Most do much more: tabs, bookmark management, cookie management, password management, plugins/extensions/add-ons, history management, JavaScript, downloads management… they’re full-on mini desktops, and they do much more than just render content. And all of this - while useful and desirable to many people - costs, in compute and especially in memory. Unless you’re running an Electron app, odds are that your the browser is the single largest consumer of memory on your computer at the monogamy moment. If I run Firefox, it even tops Factorio with multi-planet factories.

Unfortunately, Acid2 compliance is very complex, and the content of many websites is inaccessible without JavaScript, so the idea of just something like Evince for HTML isn’t pragmatic. However, having an engine that only renders CSS and XHTML could still be useful. Many sites are either JS-free, or the JavaScript only adds functionality that might be irrelevant to the content: commenting and feedback support, for example.

Gemini has failed, but a really pared down browser can still be valuable, and a fair portion of the web is still browsable without JavaScript. I think OP’s question is entirely rational, and practical.

An example that illustrates my point is epub, which is just xhtml and assets in a zip: images, yes. JavaScript, no. I can imagine a wrapper that does the networking to fetch assets, bundles the allowable ones into epub, and then runs an epub renderer. It would be an order of magnitude smaller, and cleaner, than even one of the minimalist WebKit browsers like luakit, surf, or vimb.

I run the smallest browser I can, and only open Firefox when I hit a site I both a) want to see, and b) requires JavaScript to be at all functional. Most online shopping stores fall into this category, but banking’s another. I don’t begrudge the more demanding requirements of those sites, but I don’t want the needless resource consumption of Firefox when the sites don’t require it.