Why does overlayfs break chromium’s ability to deal with cookies, and is there a workaround?

I have a Raspberry pi that runs a Chromium instance (via fullpageos). It loads a web page that requires a session variable to be stored.

This works fine until I enable overlayfs, which I want to do to reduce the number of writes to the SD card. At that point it no longer works, which I can only imagine is due to the required cookies for remembering the session id being cleared as a result of using overlayfs.

I don’t really understand why this would happen though. I thought that overlayfs would allow “writes” that persist until a reboot, and I am not rebooting.

Does anyone know how to resolve this?