Fetch has also lacked support for features that xhr has had for over a decade now. For example upload progress. It's slowly catching up though, upload progress is the only thing I'd choose xhr for.

Some might say the tradeoff of writing a small wrapper is worth it given what’s been demonstrated here.

In my experience people feel the need to wrap axios too.

> I'm not sure fetch is a good server-side API. The typical fetch-based code snippet `fetch(API_URL).then(r => r.json())` has no response body size limit and can potentially bring down a server due to memory exhaustion if the endpoint at API_URL malfunctions for some reason. Fine in the browser but to me it should be a no-no on the server.

Nor is fetch a good client-side API either; you want progress indicators, on both upload and download. Fetch is a poor API all-round.

You can pass to `fetch` an `AbortSignal` like `AbortSignal.timeout(5000)` as a simple and easy guard.

If you also want to guard on size, iterating the `response.body` stream with for/await/of and adding a counter that can `abort()` a manual `AbortSignal` is relatively straightforward, though sounds complicated. You can even do that as a custom `ReadableStream` implementation so that you can wrap it back into `Response` and still use the `response.json()` shortcut. I'm surprised I'm not seeing a standard implementation of that, but it also looks straightforward from MDN documentation [1].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Streams_API...

Browser fetch can lean on the fact that the runtime environment has hard limits per tab and the user will just close the tab if things get weird. on the server you're right

Hm, I don't think axios would do much better here. `fetch` is the official replacement for axios. If both are flawed that's another topic

Every time I'm reminded of this article about package managers. https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2025/09/08/package-manage...

Yep, got stung because a bunch of things still pull in axios even though we don't use it.

Serverless framework up until late yesterday also.