Just use plain HTML for God's sake. HN demonstrates very well that you can do plenty without some Javascript monstrosity. At the very least, make your your websites degrades gracefully when JS is turned off.
At least one (or maybe two depending how you define things) of the examples does that. Because you mean "client side javascript".
"do plenty" or just use React for everything and have a single thing where you don't need to worry about the limitations or having to remake the same stuff the framework provides?
and what % of users have JS turned off? 0.00001%?
HN uses JavaScript though, not just plain HTML.