I'm pro JWT, but reducing load on the DB itself isn't a massive argument in favor of JWTs, because an opaque token solution can simply cache the result of a rev

I'm pro JWT, but reducing load on the DB itself isn't a massive argument in favor of JWTs, because an opaque token solution can simply cache the result of a revocation check at whatever time interval is comfortable for the use case of the token. So assuming the API has access to a cache layer, there isn't a difference there. If there is no cache layer, there probably should be. In a hyperscaler situation things are different, but we should avoid treating that as the norm.