This is absurd -- the total amount of data I needed to store in the JWT was about 10 bytes.
This inefficiency bloats requests. At a time when we're migrating to http/2, which which deliberately reduces headers to speed things up, JWT is going in the other direction.
I've found that arbitrarily re-inventing the wheel because a new thing becomes popular should be done deliberately and with great caution. More generally - I think it's important to look for solutions to fit a specific problem, not problems to fit a specific solution.
However, back to JWTs - I'm currently using them for authorization in an EXTREMELY high traffic websocket server implementation. It's really nice because it's short duration (the ones I am issuing have a expiration of 60 seconds), and allows the service to operate entirely within memory except for interacting with a Kafka cluster.
Consider that host clocks are not always in sync (even NTP could leave 10 seconds of difference) and the many authentication redirections can take quite a bit of time for slow clients. Limiting tokens to 30 or even 60 seconds is asking for troubles.
But then again, I have to work with thousands of hosts, applications and datacenters, so I feel every edge cases. A single application on a single host would not.