Recently, I read some topics on Meta regarding browser support and learned that for unsupported older browsers, the basic-html view is used to ensure basic reading functionality. To understand what kind of reading experience visitors would get, I specifically downloaded Chrome 53.0.2785.101 (64-bit) to test it out.
I found that neither the mouse wheel, the spacebar, the PGDN key, nor even selecting text and moving the cursor downward to expand the selection area could scroll the page down.
Using Ctrl+mouse wheel to zoom in confirmed that content beyond the viewport had indeed loaded correctly.
Sorry, but this browser is almost ten years old. Issues with basic things like the viewport on any modern OS are to be expected. To my knowledge the “basic view” sent to old browsers does not include any JavaScript or CSS (if any, not much). You are expecting too much of the browser. I did find this but to be fair I’m not sure if there was ever a definitive answer.
If you’re desperate to try the basic view just replace your user agent in a modern browser. I sincerely hope that nobody is using Chrome from 2016 anymore to make this even slightly relevant.
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Okay, I have tested with other agents like Googlebot and it works fine. It seems the issue is that the testing environment I chose was too extreme. 
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