Not trying to defend the idea, but the domain will expire at whatever point the registrant doesn't fund renewal anyway. Is that potentially arbitrary sunset date "better" by virtue of being more distant? If the authors care to let the sites exist yet prefer to abandon stewardship now, they should transfer ownership now and to someone who cares enough to encrypt as needed.

They don't deserve a knockout punch any more than FTP or Gopher deserved it, but unfortunately commercialisation of the web and the merging of static pages into dynamic apps (feature creep) and one gargantuan application (the browser) to interface with all of it and one gargantuan entity to discover it (Google), means that minnows are going to have to go with the overall flow.

The browser providers have clearly made that decision for the vast majority of users: default safety trumps information access.

We've yet to see if users will either (A) follow the on-screen, flashing red prompts, or (B) be trained to click through the warning screens due to their sheer prevalence.

Even in case B, it's a non-negligible probability that browser vendors respond by disallowing click-through. Just another step towards (re-)making the web into a nice, safe walled garden.

those sites aren't really under any threat from an interstitial like you currently get on an expired certificate (which i assume is what the parent means by "refuses to load by default"). It would be a knockout punch for any site trying to build an audience, but it doesn't actually block the site. I don't think anybody is suggesting that insecure archived sites be deleted from the internet.