You’ll see cat FILE | all the time because it’s just a natural start to a pipeline. You cat FILE to see the content unfiltered before filtering it with further commands.

Yea, it doesn’t matter too much in most instances, but there are times when it might, especially if the URL itself has some meaning embedded in it. For example if part of the path is a SHA sum of some content, which is fairly common, it might be bad to allow someone to determine if that resource exists