"For quite a long time (and especially in the webdev world), there exists a perception that to achieve scalability, all our request handlers need to be as state

"For quite a long time (and especially in the webdev world), there exists a perception that to achieve scalability, all our request handlers need to be as stateless as possible." This is definitely overdue for a re-examination. "Web handlers should be stateless" goes all the way back to the 1990s, when a server system was lucky to have a single gigahertz, and even server systems could be looking at being loaded with the obscene quantity of maybe 128MB of RAM. The solution is obviously not to just flip all the way to the other side. But the landscape has changed a lot since then. I've made a lot of hay out of very selectively stateful web services. It takes some care, but sometimes it honestly takes less care than trying to build completely pristinely stateless servers, because it's not like that's trivial all the time either!