IF you want the page to be interactive without refreshes though, you gotta do something. Unless you are advocating a completely pre-ajax web.
"HTML over the wire" generally refers to tech like [0] LiveView, [1] Hotwire, [2] LiveView, [3] Blazor, etc. They aren't about about ditching JS and more about not writing your HTML in JS (and yes, SSR).
[0] https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view
[2] https://laravel-livewire.com/
[3] https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...