If I understand your point correctly, you're saying that when something is talking over HTTPS, the middleware doesn't get to see the verbs, and so it can't optimize for them anyway. But if part of your connection is using different transports, then middleware in those segments can observe the verbs and react accordingly (including e.g. local retries in face of adverse network conditions, to avoid expensive end-to-end roundtrips).

While technically correct, I'm not sure how this is useful. You use HTTPS to communicate with an endpoint you trust, and anything beyond that is internal network infrastructure which is much more reliable than the HTTPS hops. The utility of local retries on this last hop don't seem compelling.