Improve middleware performance

**Feature request**
It would be great to have serialization for validation.

**Use case**
Many users need this functionality for production deployments.

**Implementation idea**
Add a new config option `enable_serialization` with default `false`.

Start by locating the middleware, validation flow, and existing configuration entry points in the repository. Review how current options are defined and how validation results are handled; done means a default-false enable_serialization option provides the requested serialization behavior without changing existing deployments.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.