[marcosdumay]

This article confuses so many things that at first I thought it was making a completely different point. But let's go:

JWT is a format for tokens, it's not a choice between JWT and opaque tokens, as JWT can be opaque and transparent tokens can be in another format.

JWT just happens to be a format with good support in javascript. As a format, it's quite unremarkable, but as a standard it's a complete piece of shit where footguns abound. Anyway, it's easy to work with, while the alternatives tend to have the opposite features, being incredibly hard to work with, but easier to use correctly then wrongly.

Transparent tokens (the ones everybody knows how to verify) have the advantage over opaque tokens that you pointed out (they are easy to distribute). On the other hand, they are hard to revoke, so people tend to use short-lived ones. And yes, it's common for an application to have a long-lived opaque token that they only use in an authentication service to get short-lived transparent ones (that they use everywhere).

Anyway, the article is about the infrastructure for supporting JWT in javascript.