I turn off JS on a blacklist basis, but I've ended up disabling it for pretty much most publishers. For me it was 100% about speed: I have a relatively high-end laptop, but with the amount of tabs I keep open and the way Chrome uses CPU in the main browser process, I would literally be waiting for 5-6 seconds before I could scroll down and start reading an article (Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker, wired; pretty much any publication I've visited has this issue, and a handful of other kinds of sites too). Turning off JS for any site that misbehaves is an immense difference in speed, and the layout is usually not too broken (the exception being WP, where you have to scroll down past a page-length of whitespace before reaching the text).
