My understanding was that with http/1.1 all connections are kept alive until a close is emitted. How is this different?
But the fact that the underlying HTTP connection is kept-alive by default doesn't necessary mean that the client is going to actually re-use that connection for multiple HTTP requests. And, in fact, in Node.js the connection is not reused by default.
https://fastmail.blog/2011/06/28/http-keep-alive-connection-...