Mostly no. ssh/rsync is compiled C code, so might be slightly faster than a Python-based `wormhole`, if you have a really fast connection to take advantage of. And rsync provides that lovely continue-from-interrupted-transfer feature that magic-wormhole currently lacks.

But wormhole has turned out to be more usable in some cases. I've had days where I'm sshed into a bastion host, then sshed from there into a server, then cd'd into a deep directory with lots of spaces and quotes and shell metacharacters in the path, and then found a file that I wanted to copy out. To do that with ssh, I have to first configure ProxyJump to let me reach the internal machine with a single ssh command, and then figure out how to escape the pathname correctly (which somehow never works for me). With `wormhole send` I get to skip all of that, at the cost of having to do it once per file.

The whole point is wormhole fills in a gap where scp isn’t viable or convenient.