> Everyone I see seems to use axios these days

Axios was somewhat abandoned a year or so ago.

A new collaborator was added in Dec 2019 which apparently is picking it up.

https://github.com/axios/axios/issues/1965

Who knows for how long though...

What would be the alternative to Axios?

On the browser I generally use fetch(). It's a bit weird at first but it's easy to write a thin wrapper if the default behavior doesn't make sense. Eg: throwing when you receive a 400 or 500.

On Node I've been using this lately: https://github.com/node-fetch/node-fetch

Github shows which repositories use request. 48k is the number of modules on npm.