[moe]

Cleaner for who ? Easier for who ?

For the webapp-developer, which results in a faster and cheaper experience for the user.

I'm still baffled at your persistence given you sit pretty much at the source. You have probably written VCLs for sticky sessions yourself and pondered the constraints wrt data-locality and single points of failure? Sticky sessions are just not a good design when the alternative is so readily available; it's the first time in a long time I hear anyone disagree with that.

That kind of cookie usage just makes it Somebody Else's Problem instead of your problem.

And who would that "somebody else" be?

Users certainly don't care about a few hundred extra-bytes that their browser sends with each request, especially since that trade-off usually makes their browsing faster than the alternative would be.

The privacy concern is valid but boils down to developers using cookies wrong (without encryption). If we were to remove all technologies that are used wrong by incompetent developers then the internet would be a pretty empty place.