You didn't point out that "existing tech works". You pointed out that you can achieve a rough facsimile with existing tech, provided you're willing to invest si

You didn't point out that "existing tech works". You pointed out that you can achieve a rough facsimile with existing tech, provided you're willing to invest significantly more energy. That is the essence of the dropbox comment. Of course you can solve it with existing tech, but it takes a bunch of effort and is by far not as smooth. The achievement is not the technology itself. You can be skeptical about ease of use all you want, "Log in with a IdP you already log in to, and then just open the site" is miles easier than "just launch the tunnel via script" and all the debug steps that come invariably when the tunnel malfunctions. I know this is hard to see when to you, running an ssh tunnel is second nature. But if I gave my family a "graphical SSH client with a port-forwarding profile", they'd rightfully yell at me. These are steps they neither want to nor need to be comfortable with. And, heck, it's easier for me too. One less thing to worry about. Somebody is running a whole bunch of infra for me, and has spent a whole lot of time addressing all the edge cases that "one-liner script" doesn't address. I happily pay money for that, any time.