People use axios or ky because with fetch you inevitably end up writing a small wrapper on top of it anyway.

Fetch has also lacked support for features that xhr has had for over a decade now. For example upload progress. It's slowly catching up though, upload progress is the only thing I'd choose xhr for.

Some might say the tradeoff of writing a small wrapper is worth it given what’s been demonstrated here.

In my experience people feel the need to wrap axios too.