It's true that unauthenticated, encrypted communication is an improvement over unencrypted communication, because it rules out pure eavesdropping attacks. The q

It's true that unauthenticated, encrypted communication is an improvement over unencrypted communication, because it rules out pure eavesdropping attacks. The question is, what's the risk of eavesdropping compared to MITM? Once upon a time, "using the Internet" meant shared-medium Ethernet, and the only choke-points were things like routers (too stupid to be nefarious) and ISPs (who were too busy). These days, nearly everything is star-topography, and one of the biggest potential bad actors (the NSA) gets Internet backbone ISPs to silently do their bidding. Sure, phishing is still a thing and identity verification doesn't solve that, but at least promoting it requires continual, repeated effort. You can't just add a black box to a network closet somewhere and come back a week later to pick up all the intercepted data.