> I'm curious, what do you think the OP meant when they said "stateless"?
Any kind of user session where user information is stored for access across multiple pages. When you use $_SESSION and write a variable into it, the content is persisted on the server and the user gets a cookie with an ID which points to their session variables. This is state that needs to be shared across servers when want you scale out.
The opposite would be e.g. an jwt, where the state is stored in the token.