Earlier quoted context omitted.
For testing a client side app in development locally against a remote API, disabling cors is really handy. I have localhost.com in my hosts file and a local web server to run around it, but it's still really frustrating not being able to turn it off entirely.
Obviously I don't have context on your work, but in general, do you have control over remote API? If yes, you can setup different environments (dev, staging, production) and set CORS accordingly for each of them. If no, how is it working in production?
I mostly have the setup you describe, and most development happens against a CORS-free staging server. But it's often necessary to build a local prod version that is identical to the live version for debugging or analysis, that plays against real players and reads/writes to the same data store.
It's an edge case, and in the past when I've done web development simply turning off CORS on staging has trivially solved any issues. But it does feel a bit like the developers of the browsers have chosen not to include the feature in a "we're smarter than you, trust us, you don't want this" kind of way. For the most part, they're probably right.