Like the TSA at the airport.
Security that we never needed before, but now suddenly we do.
Now we’re dependent on a third party gatekeeper for permission to have a web site.
Free, for now.
It’s a move by the weasels-that-be to turn the Internet into yet another tool for profit and control.
You have the timeline backwards. That’s pretty much how it was untile letsencrypt hit the scene.
But the technology of https works even with a cert not from a trusted root issuer. You just have that annoying page to click through on web browsers.