As highlighted in #852, this unfortunate code is required to get a page title with the sidebar layout.
from shiny.express import layout
layout.set_page(layout.page_sidebar(title="Page title"))
And we have a similar problem if you want to change page-level settings like gap, padding, lang, etc.
I think it could make sense to have both a .set_title() and a lower-level .set_page_parameters()