I'm amused and depressed that the industry is willing to consider almost any solution -- except using something other than a web browser for tasks that do not involve browsing the web. Seriously... it works for Spotify, even now.
The world is full of clueless firewall administrators who block everything but port 80 and 443 because security. It inconveniences users a lot more than attackers, but if you try explaining this you get a bunch of cargo cultism about reducing attack surface area, etc.
Never mind that these protocols now tunnel everything and thus have equivalent attack surface area to just opening your network. I call it cargo cultism because these people superficially know security buzz-concepts but do not understand them deeply. The application of security concepts in this superficial way does tremendous harm, not to mention creating a false sense of security among the cargo cultists and their followers.
So we engage in an arms race with ourselves. We block everything, then design protocols to tunnel through our firewalls to reenable all the things we blocked, then repeat.
SSH is another penultimate tcp over tcp protocol.
The only real solution to the security problems these hacks fix is to fix operating system app and privilege isolation. But that's more work so let's just break IP with firewalls and then pretend it secures us.
It's hard to beat the browser when it comes to building adequate software on a budget. It will never beat a native app in a race to be the best, but most software is about "making it work" instead of being #1 in the app store. The latter case of course gets a lot more press.
