Can I get a gut check here that this is safe to take out?? Seems fine but I am not very familiar with these tags and I don't want to break anything.

This shouldn't be taken out! It makes the page load faster. See:

@kylecarbs @BrunoQuaresma Gotcha! So if I understand correctly, we return some API responses when the user requests index.html. This is achieved via these meta tags.

I see this pattern some places in the app:
getMetadataAsJSON<Entitlements>("entitlements") ?? API.getEntitlements()

And I'm confused because 1) wouldn't we always want fresh entitlement data? and 2) don't we already load entitlement data again in our DashboardProvider which wraps all authenticated routes?

Whenever the user loads index.html (e.g. you navigate to dev.coder.com), that would provide fresh entitlement data. It's similar to making the request from the FE, we just do it on page load.

The DashboardProvider re-fetching it would be a bug in that case.

Ok, but given this pattern:
async () => getMetadataAsJSON<User>("user") ?? API.getAuthenticatedUser(),
if a user doesn't refresh the page between login and logout, I think we'll see this bug because the user request is never rehydrated, right

Hm... @Parkreiner @Kira-Pilot maybe we should do something different like:

 return {
    queryKey: meKey,
    initialData: initialMe,
    queryFn: API.getAuthenticatedUser,
 }

Because if the initialData is undefined the query will be loaded anyways.

Yeah...This works perfectly. I double-checked the React Query type definitions, and somehow missed that initialData had an extra undefined type tagged on to its allowable values, and that it wouldn't affect the type parameters at all. I also double-checked the documentation, and found a section on this use case

I'm going to make another PR simplifying all the other functions that work like this

My concern with this approach is that getMetadataAsJSON will get recalculated every single render, even though the value is basically a constant embedded in the HTML

This should be safe to extract outside the function