As someone browser focused this surprised me. I've been using fetch() for years now.
It's nice to see the really popular ones make it in though, makes for fewer dependencies when doing browser compatible projects and also allows one to be lazy and not learn the Node way of doing it. Maybe we'll see websocket go into core some day too.
The "all over the place"-ness tends to come more from people who act like changing to a newer library is the only way to code something new not from the lack of JS forcing a single API be used across every app regardless of type.
I'm curious to know what position you occupy in our industry?
Calling an external API from a backend that integrates directly with an client app has been rare for me. Payment processing is all that comes to mind, and that was usually through an imported API package. I've made data scraping tools, but they were unique projects, not part of an app backend. I am a senior full-stack webdev.
Which brings us back to the original question you responded to above. Contrary to your odd views of how software is architected, issuing HTTP requests from the backend is both normal and common enough to be banal. Node adopting the fetch API is generally a good thing as it allows JS developers to code against the same interface whether they are working from the frontend or the backend.