Stop Defaulting to WebSockets: A Practical Guide to SSE, Polling, and Knowing When You Actually Need Them

Stop Defaulting to WebSockets: A Practical Guide to SSE, Polling, and Knowing When You Actually Need Them You've been there. A ticket lands in your sprint: "Make the dashboard real-time." Your brain immediately jumps to WebSockets. Open a persistent connection, push data to the client, done — right? Not so fast. In my experience (and the experience of plenty of devs who've debugged WebSocket auth issues at 2 AM), WebSockets are overkill for most "real-time" features. Notifications, live feeds, p