Hold on, this is backward. They said: > You should not use Thing X because the advantage it has over Thing Y is not an advantage. In fact both Thing X and Thin

Hold on, this is backward. They said: > You should not use Thing X because the advantage it has over Thing Y is not an advantage. In fact both Thing X and Thing Y have the same disadvantage. Except that Thing X has a workaround and Thing Y doesn't. But that workaround adds (gasp!) complexity! Obviously, we only ever use Thing Y and you're a bad developer if you use Thing X. It's smoke and mirrors. They never give an advantage of bearer tokens over, well, JWT barer tokens, which are a type of bearer token, the thing they said they use. They just said JWTs don't actually have one specific advantage, except when they do. That's not an argument against JWTs! > increased attack surface due to complexity of JSON parsing/validation People who use JWTs are already parsing JSON everywhere. It's not hard. If it's not valid JSON, clearly you don't authenticate. > misconfiguring JWT libraries to allow no signature You can misconfigure anything. You can misconfigure your server to not actually check the bearer token. Why is it more likely you'll forget to check the JWT signature than the bearer token? This is something you write one time and never touch; it takes an afternoon at most. > leaking data to users because you thought JWTs were encrypted Yes, you should not put sensitive data in a JWT, encrypted or not. This is a fair criticism. > Technically you can just have a single long lived bearer token instead of a long lived refresh token, and a short lived access token. Which, as they pointed out in that article, is a disadvantage of long-lived bearer tokens.