Yep, the web used to be for distributing documents, but now it is becoming/has become more of an application VM [1]. But ActivityPub is a nice format for the document distribution use-case; it is a superset (in terms of features) of semantic HTML [2] and RSS and has higher level semantics (comment sections, profiles, etc) and no server-provided scripting nor styling.
In principle, if you want the post and comments without JS you can just pull the underlying ActivityPub document (application/activity+json). I made a command-line browser based on this idea: https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... [2]: any plain HTML page can be represented as an ActivityPub Article