agree in principle, but i will split some hairs here. if you type "ls" into your local terminal, there's an implicit agreement that it will run the remote "ls" program. the helper program facilitates that in the same way that any other terminal + ssh + shell combo does. it only runs commands in response to your activities in the terminal.
i don't see any difference between this and what saltstack or ansible are doing. both can run a command on remote machines, and to do that they automatically connect to the machine and copy a program to be run there.
The biggest difference is that I install and execute salt and ansible in order to remotely install software, and I had no expectation that establishing an SSH connection would do that.
you install it locally, but not remote. then you run commands that get executed remotely by way of some tools that get automatically copied to the remote machine via ssh.
I do. And I do it in expectation that this is what will happen, because that's the whole point. Installing software on remote machines is normal for provisioning tools, but decidedly not normal for SSH clients.