Mocking networked services is something very much worth doing because you can then check you’ve set timeouts correctly, handling incomplete or junk responses gracefully etc. Those are the kind of hidden problems that can bite you on production deployments.
"mocking networked services" is exactly what you would do when testing clients.
And it doesn't have to be a static mock. It's not too hard to inject a fuzzer in your mock service response, although that's probably left to a separate testing routine, and not part of your unit test setup. But if you have no mock for your network service, you can't fuzz it either.
Try that with a networked application that takes user input though...