There are many ways to do many things. That doesn't make it cargo cult programming. Encoding your claims as a JWT is useful because there are many libraries th

There are many ways to do many things. That doesn't make it cargo cult programming. Encoding your claims as a JWT is useful because there are many libraries that work with this, it's a known format (and one that's not tied to any particular transport), and is really good for creating stateless authentication systems using asymmetric keys. If you're interested in the differences between JWTs and something like OAuth (which really are two different things entirely) then you can visit https://google.com https://google.com and type in "JWT vs Oauth2". Answers will appear on your screen.