I think this isn’t a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don’t want to let the few people that don’t have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.

It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can’t let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.