alt Hacker News>People are looking for a satisfying non-leaky abstraction to build upon and they don't find it with web technologies. They get close, but those last few pieces never quite fit, and we lack the power to reshape the pieces, so we tear out all the pieces and try again. Maybe this next time we'll find a better way to fit them together.
Also keep in mind the web standard puzzle is also changing all the time to try make the puzzle to fit better while developers are designing abstractions to catch up.
That how you get XMLHttpRequest -> ajax -> axio -> fetch and history.replaceState situation.
In general SPA has pushed web towards not so archiving friendly place. And PWA != SPA
I think you're mixing some things up there.
The history of making HTTP requests in the browser has only been two APIs: XMLHttpRequest -> fetch. Fetch is an upgraded version of XMLHttpRequest with a promise-based API and better async/streaming support.
Ajax was a word used to describe the technique of making http requests in the browser, and axios is a third party library that wraps different APIs on different platforms to provide a unified interface. These were never separate browser APIs.