I'm often using different browsers on different devices and only some of them have NoScript installed, and from my experience I can tell that usually if something doesn't work without JS, it's perfectly visible that it's broken until you whitelist it. I can also tell via tiny toolbar that something is blocked on the site, so if it doesn't include lots of analytics or social media cruft then I usually just unblock it on any pages that focus on useful content.

Before I actually installed it, I had the same concerns like you described, but the reality showed that it's moot, and the advantages were even higher than expected, so I sticked with NoScript :)