That's up to each user to decide. We (NoScript users) have our reasons to keep it disabled by default. You may not agree with them, but it's our choice.
If you have a site, it's your choice to either ignore us (like the Google Blogs) or not, but if you don't want to, then the author has a point: tells us why, not how.
Let me let you in on a little secret. We don't want you. I'm dead serious. If you're blocking our ads, and not even allowing us to count you as a visitor by blocking our analytics code, we'd really just as soon NOT have you burning up our server's CPU and using our bandwidth.
I supplied electricity, a computer, internet connection, and a virtual machine to run code in (that's a business model by itself).
I may have profited from the content, but I surely have generated revenue for the site operator. And I want a part of it, isn't that reasonable for my time and cost? I'm just as much a capitalist as the site owner. I know my visit to their site has value to them, regardless of the content.
We could argue whether they paid me enough in content. But the automatic assumption that this is true isn't acceptable. In fact, the worst and most successful offenders in this business model usually provide the lowest value and often no value at all. See link farms and other blog spam/scams.
If it isn't obvious: this is a thought experiment. I'm not actually demanding my 0.0037 cents/view.
While TylerE's response is a bit brash, I agree to a similar point. Web dev teams these days rarely consider the noscript crowd an important user base and simply code along without regard, heavily reliant on javascript. They don't need to be able to track users by Google Analytics (and maybe GA is the source of paranoia for some) or animate navigation, but modern sites are often built with the intent to show off their javascript muscle these days.
* Obnoxious and gratuitous animations - yep, that too.
* Pop-up/floating/video ads - static or near-static ads are fine. However, if it covers up the content, or makes a noise, it can go die in a fire.
* Badly-written scripts, or pages where there's half-a-dozen+ streaming video ads, can bring my creaky old laptop to its knees.
* There's a possibility (albeit small) of security holes in the browser's scripting engine.
* Personally, I consider graceful degradation a metric of the quality of a website - if it craps out without good reason, that reflects poorly on its owner, and is going to make me suspicious of the quality of their product.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all that spring to mind for me at the moment.
Privacy and security (XHR and CSRF are still two of the most common security flaws on websites) is definitively one of the reasons, but I think the most important one for me is having the habit of keeping (many) dozens of tabs opened - and sometimes opening a dozen or more within a few seconds, like when reading HN - while using a single-core 1.6GHz laptop. Heavy JS can bring it to its knees.
If you have a site, it's your choice to either ignore us (like the Google Blogs) or not, but if you don't want to, then the author has a point: tells us why, not how.