[wild_preference]

People also balked during the transition away from FTP. SSHing into servers is precisely the thing you want to get away from whether it's to change code or to hotfix your nginx.conf or to do a quick apt-get install.

Doesn't mean that we don't need SSH ever, but 99% of the time it's something we use because we're too lazy to setup automation.

I reckon you're using open-source here to mean self-hosted, but that doesn't really change anything. For example, the reason every small company I've worked at didn't have a way to analyze their logs/stderr and coincide them with other events for debugging was because they didn't, not because they couldn't.

[anothergoogler]

"FTP -> SSH -> proprietary console" does not look like evolution over a gradient of control to me. I don't understand why you're comparing FTP to SSH when SSH is lower level than FTP. FTP "throw it on the server and let mod_php deal with it" deployments were decidedly higher level than SSH-based ones. FTP deployments were often coupled with GUI-based steps, for instance database migrations run from Drupal web app.