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> the underlying protocol does not matter that much

Then why is long polling the "clear winner?"

For interoperability with HTTP tooling (eg, curl) it is the clear winner

SSE, which is just an HTTP request, works perfectly fine with curl or any other library which makes HTTP requests.

Curl and most libraries don't unwrap SSE for you out of the box, you lose the one-shot request-response leading to nonstandard flow control in integrations, etc.

Sure you can find random libraries to help but they do need to be specifically built for SSE. Plain (long-)polling does not need any of that, which makes it more attractive from an API interoperability standpoint.

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