Saying so, this has been tried for decades, and commercial interests always found ways to circumvent it.

Not only commercial interest. I'm an open source dev and i do it too. "Progressive enhancements" are anything but. It makes development of a website a pain, limits what you can achieve with the resources available and makes the end product worse for 99% of the users. Yes, i'm using (session) cookies. Yes, i am using JavaScript. It's part of the HTML standard, and if your browser vendor is unable or unwilling to integrate one of the many open source implementations, that is not my problem.

And yes, there are text-based browsers that support JS, like browsh...