Consider the case in which a service worker acts as an agnostic cache. Your only goal is serve the same resources that you would get from the network, but faster. Of course you can’t ensure all the resources will be part of your origin (consider libraries served from CDNs, for instance). As the service worker has the potential of altering network responses, you need to guarantee you are not interested in the contents of the response, nor on its headers, nor even on the result. You’re only interested on the response as a black box to possibly cache it and serve it faster.
This is what { mode: 'no-cors' } was made for.