I think it's about the principle of it, or for people who like well-designed, or at least sensibly-designed things. If I'm going to read short bit of text then surely one request is sufficient.
Do you browse the internet with the dev tools open to the network tab? Seems like a weird thing to obsess over, considering 99.9% of people won't even notice how many requests you have. Makes it a lot easier to build a UI from a RESTful API (meaning more reusable code). Obviously I'm not suggesting making 100 tracking requests, but just fetching data over multiple API calls? Why the hell not?
