This is how most web frontend and backend development was done for a couple decades, with PHP which (conceptually) starts a new interpreter instance for each re

This is how most web frontend and backend development was done for a couple decades, with PHP which (conceptually) starts a new interpreter instance for each request, and discards all state afterwards (and before PHP there was PERL and other cgi-bin scripts that actually started a new process each time), and HTML pages that lose all state on every page transition. If anything, the currently popular state of having very little request isolation inside nodejs servers and long-running SPAs is the anomaly. And at least on the server side this didn't come about from a desire to have more state, it's just an accidental side effect.