Cloud engineer here. I'm going to do my best to provide an adequate explanation without getting bogged down in technical details. As such, some of the following may be simplified or missing details for brevity.

Short answer: Yes.

Medium answer: You CAN, but the better question is, "what would the tradeoff be?"

Long answer: JavaScript was born from a need to have page changes occur client-side. This has some benefits. The main ones are client-side control of page rendering (helps with accessibility), server-side performance, and asynchronous page changes.

The benefit to client-side rendering is that the site host only needs to worry about the content of their site; how it appears to the user is controlled by the user. So, if a user needs high-contrast colors, they can do that on their own; they don't need to rely on the host to program that functionality.

Next, performance. If no page updates can occur client-side, they must occur server-side, which demands much higher performance from the hosting server. Rendering a page requires a lot more compute than simply transmitting the HTML code and letting the browser figure it out.

Finally, possibly the biggest benefit to JS is the ability to perform asynchronous updates to the page you're viewing. This is when the browser communicates with the server and updates the page without refreshing the page.

So, depending on the use case, it can be done. For simple, static sites with low traffic and adequate server performance, it's fine to do. But, the more sophisticated you want the site to be, depending on exactly what you want to do, it may not possible. I don't think an online store or secure web portal would be possible, for example.

yes, we did it for a long time

and many websites still do it toda

CSS can now do much of the things devs used to do with JS

you'll pry my PHP from my cold dead hands, though

If you're asking about a theoretical timeline without JavaScript: yes, of course. The modern internet is more than just web pages, and there are millions, if not billions, of internet-connected services and devices which never need to touch JavaScript to function. Even just referring to websites, you do not need JavaScript to render some text, create forms, or even create a navbar with fancy submenus and visual effects. JavaScript just makes it easier to do (at the cost of performance, usually). Similarly, JavaScript could be replaced by a more advanced form of WebAssembly that can manipulate the DOM.

If you're asking about whether you can browse websites on the internet today without JavaScript: yes, you can disable JavaScript on every major browser. Most websites should function, but some things won't work correctly. You'll run into issues if you use your browser for things like online banking, but if you just want to search for information, most websites will work.

If you're asking whether you can disable JavaScript in your browser: yes, of course.

Yep. Without JS, websites are just static pages (this was the norm in the web 1.0 era). An interesting project that runs with this idea is the Gemini protocol, which is basically an alternative text-based internet.