As mentioned existing HTTP clients had this behaviour back in 2012, the designers of fetch chose to ignore these cowpaths in favour of a more minimal implementation requiring the use of third party HTTP clients in both browsers and node, simply to have reasonable defaults and not repeat oneself, for the foreseeable future.

the value the js community gets from `fetch` being a unified standard is far, far greater than the benefit you as a developer would get from not having to add 15 extra LOC around `fetch`, that you'll probably hide behind a `fetchJSON` function anyway.

Point is everyone had a slightly different 150 LOC or a library to achieve essentially the same thing.

We could have stuck with ‘if index is not equal to minus one’ but we have array includes now for the same reason.