On this France road trip with my developer friends, we ended up having one of those classic car debates: do we actually NEED “www” in a domain name, or is it just a redundant historical artifact? I asked Rafael to break it down, and we got into the practical side of it—like why “www” still shows up in real setups, not because it’s trendy, but because DNS can be annoying in very specific ways. The big takeaway: one legit reason people use “www” is DNS/CNAME behavior. As Rafael explained, you can’t put a CNAME on the root domain in the usual DNS rules, which pushes people toward using “www” as a subdomain where CNAME works cleanly. Then we talked about how to avoid it: Cloudflare has a feature called root flattening, where Cloudflare resolves the root CNAME for you and effectively returns an IP to the client (so from the outside it looks like an A record). So yeah—“www” isn’t mandatory, but it’s sometimes the path of least resistance unless you’re using something like Cloudflare to smooth out the root domain edge cases.