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Exactly how http was the standard for normal websites and banks et. al. using https until, everyone was.

Now that was a good thing with https, not so much with passkeys until Chrome pushes through a change and says they'll only accept attested passkeys issued by their own google password manager/authenticator.

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Adding HTTPS everywhere was not "a good thing", it's coping with a civilizational coordination failure that shifted us to a lower trust equilibrium. We're paying the price for that in an endless update treadmill for clients and even for read-only webservers. And more compute-cycles and latency spent on the encryption handshake. We also lost caching HTTP proxies. This is bad actors creating a negative-sum outcome.

Not encrypting by default is a ludicrously unstable position as far as trust 'equilibrium' goes. It would be an astounding feat of coordination to avoid needing it as the internet grow, probably one that would cost far more than https.

Conversely, exploiting the the lack of encryption would also be an unstable position because the world then shifts to encryption, voiding your access. So you're trading a one-time benefit to yourself against permanent ongoing costs for the whole world.

I know that humans are poorly equipped to solve these kinds problems, but it still is lamentable.

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