So far the base address of the Ethernet chip was a general property of all Ethernet drivers. It served two purposes:
1. Allowing to use a single Ethernet driver for a certain Ethernet chip, no matter what machine was connected to the chip.
2. Allowing use an Ethernet card in all Apple II slots.
However, we now use customized Ethernet drivers for the individual machines so 1.) isn't relevant anymore. In fact one wants to omit the overhead of a runtime-adjustable base address where it isn't needed.
So only the Apple II slots are left. But this should rather be a driver-internal approach then. We should just hand the driver the slot number the user wants to use and have the driver do its thing.
Independently from the aspect if the driver parameter is a base address or a slot number the parameter handling was changed too. For asm programs there was so far a specific init function to be called prior to the main init function if it was desired to chnage the parameter default. This was done to keep the main init function backward compatible. But now that the parameter (now the slot number) is only used on the Apple II anyhow it seems reasonable to drop the specific init function again and just provide the parameter to the main init function. All C64-only user code can stay as-is. Only Apple II user code needs to by adjusted. Please note that this change only affects asm programs, C programs always used a single init function with the Apple II slot number as parameter.
IP65 doesn't support TCP flow control. Therefore it doesn't make sense to write a program receiving a significant amount of data via TCP using IP65. From that perspective it makes sense that IP65's HTTP client doesn't allow to handle incoming data with a callback but requires a buffer being able to hold the whole HTTP body.
However, on the Apple II there's the Uthernet II card with its W5100 Ethernet controller chip. That chip has it's own TCP implementation supporting TCP flow control. Therefore the wget65 program uses the W5100 TCP capabilities for the HTTP client.
But even with the W5100 TCP implementation in place IP65 still plays a role for the wget65 program as it desires DHCP and requires (usually) DNS. Both are not supported by the W5100 capabilities.