It's not clueless or sloppy. They are most likely using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_Web_Token which is a well-defined standard and extremely common in the authentication world because it makes a ton of sense. It lets your authentication server be mostly stateless instead of storing tons of sessions unnecessarily.
> How? Just use AppService / EC2 for managed machines. Scales just as well.
It's not about scaling. It's about being able to make a docker image, run that locally on your developer laptop (even if it's a mac) and running the exact same thing in production. Sure you can use docker on top of EC2 but why would you? Just use the ready to go solution you can just buy (managed k8s) and avoid the lock-in. Again, it's critical that you use managed k8s. Don't roll it yourself on top of EC2.
> You need a DB most of the time. Managed DBs are easier.
Sure. Using k8s for your app isn't stopping you from doing that if you want. We deploy 1 database server per testing environment, which kubernetes makes easy to do. For production we use a managed database, but they're too expensive for testing environments.
> Our crapware doesn't freeze. Needs a custom Health Check endpoint. Can just as easily restart the instance when that check fails.
Mine doesn't either. But I have to run plenty of software that isn't mine.
> K8S is a ton of extra overhead for no gain
If you used managed k8s you're just trading server management for kubernetes resource management. I've migrated our system from Ansible + Cloud VMs to kubernetes several years ago, after running it for years before, and things have become significantly easier to maintain and our costs are roughly the same as before. Less vendor lock-in, too. It would take me an about an afternoon to switch between any of the major managed kubernetes offerings, and some of our clients have expressed preferences for a specific cloud.
k8s saves a TON of time if you need to run on more than 1 machine and you use a managed solution (by AWS/GCP/Azure) and only use it as a glorified docker container orchestrator. Ingress solves how to route HTTP traffic coming into your domain. PersistentVolume solves how and where to store data. LivenessCheck solves how to restart your crapware when it freezes. Just don't go crazy with it unless you actually need the fancy stuff.
I wish lawyers would lose their license when they're obviously attacking people (or in this case companies) in bad faith. This is ridiculous, go grieve like a normal person.
Me not buying their products doesn't stop my users from doing so, or my employer from demanding we support them. Also you've clearly never been on the submitting side of the app store, this "careful curation" often misses blatant violations and instead nags for weeks on minor or non-existent issues while refusing to elaborate.
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."