It probably comes from misusing the API route and feeling they want to keep it simple, but instead heavily coupling things. A motivated BE that wants to be pro

It probably comes from misusing the API route and feeling they want to keep it simple, but instead heavily coupling things. A motivated BE that wants to be productive avoiding unnecessary work would probably hate being "support for frontend" whenever they decide to change something and a motivated frontend would probably want to turn themselves to full stack powers to not depend on someone else. It feels really bad as a pattern unless that webapp is your only concern and is constantly moving or something, or if there's no actually FE or BE but just few people maintaining stuff as a side concern (backend for frontend works there).