Good to hear. Even with edge you can have a request that blocks or does something silly so IMO it should have had node from the beginning. A common use case is verifying a session or authorization for an entire area.
Unfortunately, that's an anti-pattern here if you are making a request. If you're just checking cookies, then yes that makes sense. The documentation on auth for Next.js tries to make this clear, but my feeling is that "middleware" was a bad name and it came off like we were trying to do Express middleware 1:1.