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How exactly would we go about adding state to http without the hackish workarounds we currently use involving query strings, hidden fields, cookies and session state?
It wouldn’t. One of the basic assumptions in HTTP is that clients are requesting pages, and the pages are more or less static (maybe with some extra parameters, cookies, etc). Each request is distinct and individual, and the protocol isn’t really designed to be stateful — this greatly simplifies the implementation of clients and servers.
Tracking state is a higher level function — that is left to the server or client separately.
These work-arounds are hackish for a reason: HTTP is meant to be primarily stateless. “Stateful” HTTP is impossible, because it isn’t really HTTP anymore, it’s something totally different.