I'm not sure you're actually asking for my opinion, or just making a point, but IMO, the "statelessness" most people describe with respect to web services simpl

I'm not sure you're actually asking for my opinion, or just making a point, but IMO, the "statelessness" most people describe with respect to web services simply means that a single request already has as much as possible of the information required (outside of current time, securely fetching/validating public keys, etc) to process the request. The point is that it's easier for distributed systems as a whole when clients hold onto their client-specific state, rather than a minimal token that the server, likely being load balanced for availability, must exchange for that state with yet another service in yet another stateful/authenticated request/response manner.