Same story here. Actually, I think all of these new features would work without JS, using just CSS, except retaining collapsed threads across page loads (although given that CSS is technically Turing complete it is probably possible if the state were persisted server-side, which you can do with an html form; personally I would just use JS and cut my hosting costs). Check out this demo of CSS-only HTML:
But these new features require JS and that's fine with me. Not all JS is evil.