Oh yes they do.
> Any time I see IP addresses passed around it’s a sign of broken infrastructure
Nope.
> It also means you aren’t using tls or you’re training people to accept cert errors
So, let me get this straight. You have a server that's behind CloudFlare, and you're claiming we should use DNS and TLS to SSH into it?
You said devs and technical staff were typing IPs into their browsers. Presumably this means the address bar, which breaks TLS.
SSH derives a big chunk of security from key caching. If you’re using IPs you now can’t have an IP change without triggering key warnings on the SSH clients for a new key at a minimum or (worst case) a breach.
Every server/VM I control (~200) has a DNS entry. Every active IP has a reverse (PTR) entry.
I have a monitoring task to check for missing DNS entries, as it usually suggests a problem (i.e. we've deployed or undeployed something incompletely).