Comment by williamdclt

I think you're misunderstanding what your parent meant by "abuse".

In in this context it meant "misuse", there's no malicious actor involved. GET should have no side-effect which enables optimisation like prefetching or caching: they used it for an effectful operation (deletion) so prefetching caused a bug. It's the developers fault, for not respecting the guarantees expected from GET.

If they'd used POST, everything would have been fine. There's much less of an argument for using `POST /whatever/delete` rather than `DELETE /whatever`. At this point it's a debate on whether REST is a good fit or not for the application.