Probably not. It is often the case that a site is built entirely (read meaningfully) in JS. If one wanted to degrade gracefully without JS, one would have to have two sites: JS and Plain-Old-HTML. Now this is not possible, especially for a startup. You have a set number of resources. DRY helps allocate them. If you violate DRY with 2 sites, you're focus is going to be lost.

Now some might say that good web design was violated by make the site dependant on JS. However, as the title shows, this is 2012. My cellphone has the ability to render most JS effectively. The old adage about degrading JS is just that, old. It was in a day before ECMA Script was sanctioned or common on the browsers. It was before jQuery and the like unified the browsers.

tl;dr: JS is ubiquitous and is what the front end, and even the whole app is built on.