It’s not a GET request on the credit history; those do not affect the score. It’s a PUT* request on the “considering taking additional credit” record.

* perhaps closer to PATCH as multiple requests in short time are combined as one (as in mortgage shipping)

The key though is this operation only happens when it’s part of a requested credit evaluation for the purposes of expanding credit. The act of requesting new credit diminishes your credit worthiness. The intent is to throttle issuance of credit by providing for a race condition - if I go out and apply for 100 credit cards at the same time, they each get a credit report without the others line of credit established because they’re all in the pending state. But each request to evaluate the worthiness of credit dampens the quality of credit. At a certain point all credit requests thereafter fail.

On the flip side it also causes a hole that’s increasingly hard to dig out of because if you have bad credit or borderline credit and apply for a card to see if you’re allowed back in at the capitalist buffet, you enter into a feedback loop of diminishing credit worthiness.

It isn’t true however that any form of read changes credit worthiness. There are many routine reads that have no impact. It’s specifically when you’ve directly requested an evaluation for expanded credit. It can’t happen passively, as sometimes banks refresh your credit history and even offer more credit automatically. It also can’t happen for other purposes than expansion of credit.

A hard-pull is not a GET; it's a POST. The semantics are "this person is actively seeking credit, and we are considering whether to extend it to them". The system regards the extent of credit-seeking behavior, and changes to its pattern, as a factor that affects the credit profile.

That's not prima facie unreasonable. If you have someone who suddenly starts applying for lots of personal loans (for example), that's probably something you'd be interested in, as someone who has previously extended credit to that person.

As the prior poster indicated, when you look at your own credit file, it's not a hard pull. Nor is it a hard pull when a creditor updates their records on you as part of ongoing monitoring of your account. It's only a hard pull when the subject is specifically requesting a new, or increased, extension of credit. Those soft-pulls are GETs.