This is a wonderful summary but I'm struck with how these things all seem unnecessarily complicated compared to Python' requests, Apache Commons clients, curl based libraries... I get that a lot of magic also comes from the Erlang resilience, and maybe the functional composing is certainly interesting, but JavaScripts and Clojure and arguably you could do this with anything with promises... Anyway.

This sounds great in the sense that many of the issues I've had with those other platforms also have consideration here, but I guess my real question is:

Are http(s) requests always going to be bespoke and have application specific considerations? It also seems we can't escape having to know all of the layers ultimately, the socket, TLS, etc sometimes for even the most basic of http use cases. I feel like we don't have to do this for... Many other protocols.