Perhaps the article was not explaining in detail what this daemon does. No, it's not just an SSH endpoint on instance X. For large deployments it is an SSH gate

Perhaps the article was not explaining in detail what this daemon does. No, it's not just an SSH endpoint on instance X. For large deployments it is an SSH gateway (better implementation of jumphost) to your entire data center and it's running on multiple hosts behind an LB. Yet, every instance of it may be supporting hundreds of long-lived SSH connections originating from multiple teams, some of them can be deploying something critically important. So, yes, this socket acrobatics is absolutely table stakes and is required (and has been requested by corporate customers of T) for robust infrastructure upgrades. Old-timers like to refer to this as "carrier-grade" way of doing things. You may dislike SSH itself, but hey - that's what our current UNIX tooling depends on, so we have to make it work, and work well. Besides, even stateless HTTP sometimes needs reliable long-lived connections! Full disclaimer: I'm one of early Teleport contributors.