Are Task requests rare?

(I don't know this is the right place to ask this question. Please redirect to discourse if needed.)

The doc comment on Http.task says:

Just like request, but it creates a Task. This makes it possible to pair your HTTP request with Time.now if you need timestamps for some reason. This should be quite rare.

However, I don't get why using tasks should be rare. (Or, does "This" point the use of Time.now?) So, some notes about the thoughts behind it would help.

Context

We have many API requests in the codebase at work. Like this.

module Api.Request exposing (..)

getFoo : String -> Task Http.Error Foo
postFoo : Foo -> Task Http.Error Foo
...

The reason of having Task based API is that we often have to combine requests.

Task.map2 or Task3 to combine multiple requests to initiate each page
- Ideally, this should be done in parallel.
Task.andThen to chain requests
- For example, getFoo fooId |> Task.andThen (\foo -> getBar foo.barId)

All the functions return Task by default so we can avoid calling toTask so often (which happened when I used Request based API in 1.0.0).

I guess the answer of my question is something like:

HTTP requests should not be sent very frequently (chatty API is an anti pattern)
UI should show each data respectively (object-based UI design)
Server should give optimized API for each page

They might be true, but our development cannot always do things right. Seeing labels like "should not" or "rare" is a kind of fear when we are deeply depending on the feature, because it sometimes means "this feature will be removed soon".

Edit: Another context: I'm writing an explanation of Task in my book and it says "Task is useful to chain HTTP requests" with some examples.

elm / http

Are Task requests rare? #50

Context