How is that fundamentally different from storing sessions in a database (which is common to be able to scale horizontally)? Whether or not that is a lot of ove

How is that fundamentally different from storing sessions in a database (which is common to be able to scale horizontally)? Whether or not that is a lot of overhead depends also on how much work you were going to do to process the rest of the request. If your API allows sorting and filtering of a large data set, like the article suggests, then the authentication overhead is probably relatively small.