(More broadly though the operational overhead of software is really high these days in a lot of ways. I think that's true of anything, not just HTTPS, but there are a lot of other historical factors leading to that.)
I think it's a bit of a leap to suggest that just doing things like banning mass surveillance would magically make systems more stable or make 15yo operating systems suddenly relevant on the net again. We'd probably still need a lot of the stuff we have in place already. However, I suggest we try it anyway because there's only one way to find out and oh well we won't lose anything valuable anyway.
Mass surveillance is not the only reason to have HTTPS everywhere. It protects not just from snoopers, but from MITM attacks.
HTTPS is wonderful because it offers a guarantee that the data isn’t tampered with (except with corporate root CAs, but that is fuckery).
But LE doesn't remove the compatability challenges. If you needed to ship a device today that would sit in a box for 10 years and then get online and get an update via https, that's really hard to do. TLS protocols sometimes get discouraged, and CA changes happen, etc.
Sorry, but this argument doesn't hold water
And this coming from someone who supports systems still running NT 4
I have fallback rules enabled on all of my domains - TLS 1.3 is preferred, but older editions will be supported if the need arises (1.2, 1.1, and 1.0 (on a single domain))
We could return back to IPsec, or tunnel everything under https as a more modern version of IPsec, but those solutions are all disliked depending on who you ask.
There are other solutions such as MTA-STS and DNS-over-HTTP but the end-to-end validation of DNSSEC is pretty powerful.
