basic responsiveness to support most devices

Dude, that is the mother of responiveness. It literally supports all the devices.

Entirely true.

I'm currently working on a little project that's interesting to me (a low-spoiler walkthrough system for adventure games) and after a lot of back and forth, I decided to cut all of JS out of the picture. Just get rid of all of it, and do good old 90s server-side rendered HTML with modern CSS placed on top of it.

And that's, honestly, a joy. The first draft of a page looks like the first screenshot, then you add some semantic classes to the html and throw some simple CSS at it and it looks acceptably neat. And I could get rid of so much janky toolchain I just fail to understand.