> I don’t even know the difference between a form submitted through JS vs a browser.

I think you do. GP just phrased it oddly.

The distinction is between a traditional HTML form and browser page load, vs XMLHttpRequest.

Ultimately it's all HTTP though and on that level, there is no difference whatsoever.

"Who cares? "

You are proving my point. You should care.

Why? I’d rather care about ML.

My point is that your question is some esoteric gotcha party question that may as well be out of Trivial Pursuit. But you’re treating it like anyone who doesn’t care is just being a bad engineer. There are countless ways engineers spend their time, and choosing what to work on is the most important choice of their careers. It’s on you to justify the claim that knowing the difference between a JS form submit vs browser submit matters at all, let alone that it’s a distinction that comes up in day to day life.

The issue isn’t that every single person in the IT field needs to know HTTP in detail. The issue is that people who have invested in training for a role and are applying for a role do not understand fundamental technologies that are essential to that role.

For you that would be trying to work in ML not understanding any of the theory or how it works, but having used OpenCV with some premade models a few times.

For a frontend web developer who, as a large part of their role, will need to communicate with backend systems… that’s not understanding how their FE web application actually communicates with BE systems.

And from experience… yes, this is very common. And it has a noticeable impact on their effectiveness. Trying to debug why some interaction between your application and the BE application isn’t working while thinking the dev tools network inspector is just black magic and nonsense makes your job substantially more difficult.

This does make these people bad engineers. They are not able to understand and solve a huge class of the problems that they face day-to-day and instead (in my experience) often fall back on “just try a bunch of different things until something works for reasons I don’t understand” which is a poor way to approach work and leads to overly complex, buggy, brittle systems.

If you're a web developer, form submission is not esoteric trivia, although ML may be.