I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that despite having the title "senior", you have little or no experience in commercial software development? Because what you dismiss as "special cases" covers a vast amount of the plumbing of the modern web. In modern apps even something as simple as storing and retrieving files requires HTTP calls at some point in the stack, and such calls should never under any circumstances be initiated from someone else's computer.
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.