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How else could frontend read them? If you don't need this then regular cookies are better.

It's the other way round - the front-end shouldn't need to read JWTs, just pass them on.

if your frontend is interrogating the jwt you're doing it wrong

Isn't it pretty common to read the expiration so you know when to refresh tokens?

It is, among other things like username or user e-mail address.

This is also, together with backend scalability, a major selling point for JWTs. Otherwise one might just as well use regular session ids in cookies.