I completely agree. For many years, I've gotten the impression the SSL ecosystem is designed to undermine endpoint security. For instance, there were credible

I completely agree. For many years, I've gotten the impression the SSL ecosystem is designed to undermine endpoint security. For instance, there were credible accusations that the NSA had a mole on the standardization committee back in the 90's. Their entire job was allegedly to promote things that increased implementation complexity and block things that simplified implementation. SSL client certs (which this change is yanking) are great for convenience and security (assuming you trust the CA). Frequently rotated certs lead to outages, and normalize needless credential rotations. If you believe your backend server is compromised, this is a good thing. However, in any scenario where you're achieving your security goals, that server isn't compromised (the data on it is probably more sensitive than the cert) and rotating the certificate frequently just makes it harder to detect a third party using a man-in-the-middle cert to transparently proxy it. Speaking of which: If you can momentarily control a DNS record or if you are a cloud provider that controls all network paths to your customers, then you can use Lets Encrypt (or any of the ACME providers) to generate a MITM certificate + transparently proxy traffic. For traffic I care about securing, I use things like wireguard or SSH trust on first use.