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I notice on my system (Manjaro Linux) that:
/netWhat is the intention behind this directory (quoting chapter and verse)?
Is it like /mnt (which is for temporary mounts) but for network (eg sshfs, nfs) mountpoints?
Or, in other words, is it like /media, but for non-removable non-temporary mount points?
Yes, it is very similar to /mnt and is designed to contain nfs shared directories from remote hosts.
If there is a NFS server named nfsserver sharing a directory named shared-directory, you can access it just by listing or reading files in /net/nfsserver/shared-directory[/filepath].
This featured is provided by the automounter, was first implemented by Sun Microsystems in SunOS 4 (1988).
Unlike Linux, Solaris is documenting it in its file system hierarchy standard documentation:
$ man filesystem
...
/net
Temporary mount point for file systems that are mounted
by the automounter.
Note that the /net directory is not hardcoded and you can select a different one by editing the /etc/auto.master or /etc/autofs/auto.master configuration file. See for example this documentation page.
Note also that the same mechanism can be used to automount CIFS or fuse based (e.g. sshfs) file systems shares. See this Gentoo wiki page or that Ubuntu documentation one.
amd standard configuration is to mount on /a, not /net which is autofs standard mount point. I assume the OP machine is running autofs, not amd.
sshfs /mnt/hostname mounted there?
/mnt and /net are different directories and sshfs and NFS are different protocols. Nothing particular would happen if you use both methods to access the same shared directory. That would gave you to different paths to the same data.
sshfs /net/host mounted and autofs wants to mount host's NFS directories?
auto_master file.