Is Axios Dead? I Built a Policy-First HTTP Client for TypeScript

Beyond Axios: From Imperative Requests to Declarative Transport Policies with pureq Most TypeScript teams still start with one default answer for HTTP: "just use Axios". That was a good answer for years. But today, the core challenge is no longer sending requests. It is designing transport behavior that stays reliable, observable, and maintainable as systems grow. That is a paradigm shift: Imperative style (per-call patches and interceptor side effects) Declarative policy style (explicit, composable transport rules) pureq is built for the second model. GitHub: https://github.com/shiro-shihi/pureq npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@pureq/pureq Why Existing Options Start to Hurt Native fetch: flexible, but incomplete by default fetch gives you primitives, not a reliability system. Teams usually rebuild: Timeout/deadline behavior Retry rules Circuit breaker logic Deduplication Unified error classification This often leads to duplicated utilities and inconsistent behavior across services.