See https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-cors-for-developers/#cors
> Enter Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. The challenge when designing CORS was how to enable web applications to request and receive more cross-origin permissions, without exposing existing applications to new attacks. By the time CORS arrived on the scene there were already billions of HTTP resources in use by a wide array of applications beyond the traditional browser. Many of those resources relied implicitly on the original permission table. For example, they might expose a privileged endpoint on an intranet, but check for a special HTTP request header that only a non-browser or same-origin client could set, to protect themselves from CSRF-type attacks. The design of CORS couldn’t suddenly make all those existing applications vulnerable; it needed to evolve the web platform in a backwards-compatible way.
If we had started with the assumption that you can make requests and receive responses from any site to any other site, then we would not have the confusing mess that is CORS.
> The story behind * Why does the * mode of CORS behave so differently than the credentialed mode? Given the already long history of web vulnerabilities attributable to abuse of ambient authority, there were two schools of thought about how to expand the web platform with cross-origin requests. One camp proposed extending the already-familiar cookie model to authenticate to cross-origin resources. The other camp felt that ambient authority was a mistake in the architecture of the web, and advocated for cross-origin requests free of any ambient credentials or origin-based authentication. (Such requests, they also argued, could be exempt from the Same Origin Policy entirely, as they would be equivalent to loading from an unprivileged proxy.) The XDomainRequest object in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and 9 retained some of this style - it had no support for credentials, only anonymous requests, although it also used the same Access-Control-[...] headers.
> The familiarity and compatibility of the cookie-based credentials model of CORS eventually won more favor with developers than re-designing their applications in a capability-security style. (https://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/) As a compromise, the anonymous request mode was retained as a “subset” of CORS. Unfortunately, the subtle differences in architectural style that persisted and the choice of * to represent such requests has been a consistent source of confusion.