I would argue if you're trying to chain middleware or communicate between middleware, you're already holding it wrong. In basically every other framework you would have similar issues, in that there is no good, safe way to achieve what you're describing except persisting some data on an object and then hoping for the best. It's brittle, not type safe and just generally poor design.

With that said, I do agree that nextjs middleware is trash. My main issue with it is that I never use nextjs on vercel, always on node, but I'm still limited in what I can use in middleware because they're supposed to be edge-safe. Eye roll. They are apparently remedying this, but this sort of thing is typical for next.