Apparently this rubs people the wrong way. I get it, run Lets Encrypt and certbot blah blah, but if I am hosting an ESP32 in my house for a hobby project, I running HTTP on the LAN.
Presumably you are serving that content so it can be consumed no? It's not like your consumers can consume https if you only serve http. But yeah I suppose if you are serving read-only content and don't give a shit about what happens client side, there's a lot less reason for https.
If it's entirely public data then there's no security risk to the server. The security benefit is for the clients, so unless you hate your users you should use encryption even for totally public static data.
People are assuming you want others to be able to see want you are serving. In such case, the server is the only one who can secure the transmission to prevent MITM. The viewer cannot reach over and add in https into the request to prevent their ISP from injecting ads (or other kinds of MITM changes).
However, your browser might prevent you from connecting to http due to strict https only policy. My browser will stop any connection to http page and throw up a warning.