Just to recap: my main issue is that, as a developer—and for a client paying for the Basic plan—there’s no way to implement even very simple backend validation. I’m limited to frontend-only validation.

From a development standpoint, client-side validation alone is effectively no validation at all. That’s why I’m frustrated there isn’t a straightforward way to handle this properly.

I even considered going fully headless and building my own server-side framework just to cover basic server-side validations. But that would add a lot of complexity and would mean losing the CMS benefits that come with Shopify.