I wonder if it's HTTP because of certificate validity problems, wasn't there a case where a Mac couldn't boot to "Online Recovery" mode when the date on the mac

I wonder if it's HTTP because of certificate validity problems, wasn't there a case where a Mac couldn't boot to "Online Recovery" mode when the date on the machine is wrong (and therefore it treated the server's certificate as invalid)? I guess a fix for the above issue would be to first query a server for the current time/date.