Comment by nirava
It is really simple to make sure your blurred css placeholder is cosmetic, and a progressive enhancement. I would know, I wrote one a month ago for my personal site.
My goal was to have something that'd transmit all the essential bits of the site in the first 14kB, and worked basically on everything. It wasn't hard, honestly.
It wasn't a particularly complex site but i guess what I'm saying is any well done (and well intentioned) implementation of blurred image placeholders will works with or without JS. That is just sound engineering...