It was obnoxious, let's encrypt solved that from the operator's perspective.

Man in the middle attacks are very real. A good ratio of routers get hacked during manufacture, or have a backdoor that get exploited by other hackers. an http hits make these exploit even easier to execute. Public WiFi are often insecure, https works around that problem (for the most part).

From an attacker perspective, widespread https has become obnoxious, yes.