It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it. You don't have to throw the baby (gemtext missing inline links!) out with the bathwater.
Possible, but painful. Take HN's official search engine, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/
I open it. "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled" sigh Accept JS from hn.algolia.net and the mangled cloudfront domain (and make sure not to accept ravenjs.com). Possibly cdn.jsdelivr.net if I want to spare a click later, because I don't know if it's useful (it's not). Reload. Now the results are blank. Ah, it makes XHRs to telemetry.algolia.net, a mangled algolia.net domain, and three mangled algolianet.com domains. Think for a second. Accept the latter too (actually, either is enough, but I don't know that). Reload. Oh, it works now. Luckily there isn't a privacy consent popup I need to reject (or block with uBlock).
It's exhausting to do that almost every time you visit a new website. And with https:// URLs, you don't know ahead of time how many rounds of accepting you'll need to do before opening.
I’m not convinced that an entirely new protocol is necessary. How is the Gemini experience different from just browsing all webpages with JS disabled, or if you want to go even further, using a web browser that just doesn’t implement JavaScript?
There are all sorts of uses for cryptographic proofs; e.g. you can sign a document and prove that you were the one who signed it, or you can do a bunch of double-SHA hashes and prove ownership of a Bitcoin, you can prove via a SSL certificate that the content that claims to come from somedomain.example actually does, etc etc.
But there's no way, via currently existing protocols, to deliver a document with a proof that the document does not contain code designed to track the user or that the document will display properly without running arbitrary scripts.
Gemini is bikeshedding, yes. But it solves this social problem - a problem of expectations. You can't make a webpage with tracking scripts and deliver it over Gemeni because there's no point. No one who received the document would actually execute any of the scripts. So Gemini succeeds at creating a little insular community where tracking and web analytics are not just forbidden, but impossible.
I like that the protocols prevent any abuse.
I've been blocking JS for a damn long time but it just breaks so many things. And if you selectively block JS with umatrix, that also breaks things sometimes.
I gotta say I'm really fed up with playing whack a mole. I'd like to find a corner of the internet where things just work and don't have antifeatures.
