It’s great that we’ve went full circle. But make no mistake that this only means one thing: that servers are cheaper than ever. We can now afford to entertain previously extravagant ideas.
I'm sure many people reading this have many idle GitHub repos set up with webhooks into some kind of build server. The repo might see no more than one commit a week.
It makes absolutely no sense for GitHub to long-poll (or websocket) all of these build servers.
(Now what would make sense is for /events to support a way to flip over to a webhook when it's idle. IE, long-poll for a minute, then the next request sends a URL for a 1-time webhook called on the next event.)
At this point, its honestly just easier to just have a websocket + events endpoint with a cusor both.
Websockets or server sent events at least signal to intermediaries that a longer term connection will be open.
We've not come full circle. This is just one blog saying "how about long-polling". While also ignoring that since then we've gained web sockets, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, each of which make long-polling pointless in three different ways.
None of those have strong support across language frameworks for using them as a client from a server context. Especially http/3.