If you want to stay low on resources you can use Netsurf.

I just started it and loading my https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ page used 86 MB of RAM - a lot less then Firefox or Chrome.

It should run very quickly given that there are few things competing with it for resources like CPU cache space.

It's like "your car is going to get dirty why even wash it?"

frogfind can be quite helpful.

I'm sure Lynx would be fine.

Been over a decade since I used a terminal browser, how do they handle modern websites with javascript?

They don't. Javascript is completely unsupported.