I actually like having a variety of status codes to represent different scenarios. When I'm debugging a request at a glance my mental heuristic is "200-299 mean

I actually like having a variety of status codes to represent different scenarios. When I'm debugging a request at a glance my mental heuristic is "200-299 means success, 300-399 means redirection, 400-499 means client error, 500-599 means server error". Not sure what you mean about JS fetch calls. The status code doesn't determine wether or not the catch block executes. The only thing it does affect is the value of the response.ok boolean (which is true if the status code is less than 300). There are a few cases where fetch will throw an exception, but status codes aren't among them: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/fetch#exceptions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/fetc...