it’s common programming advice that global variables are bad

They're not. This is what we tell beginners because one needs to be careful when maintaining a global state and beginners often do it horribly.

But having a global state is sometimes the right solution.

Pro tip: if you ever find yourself saying "x programming practice is always wrong" you're probably wrong.

Isn't a database only as global as you make it? The connection is surely a real object that needs to be passed around and referenced just like any other.

I don't really touch JavaScript or web dev so I might be misunderstanding the domain usage.

That's a weird take.

A database is a store for globals only if we don't care too much about introducing complexity.

Globals often need to have the following properties:

1. Need to persist for the duration of the program.
2. Everybody needs the latest value out of the global variable.

Now both of these things don't need to be explicitly a "global variable" in the programming sense. Logically speaking we just need code that implements the behaviour of the global variable well enough to satisfy our requirements.

most DBs are most often an overkill for our requirements of a global variable.

sqlite is a fantastic fit for this use-case if one wants some level of ACID properties.

One can go with a redis cache or some other kind of disk caching KV store.

Or simply just go with a global variable and measure how it does before doing all this crap.