I think everybody understands the benefits of HTTPS, there is no need to discuss that. But the fact remains that forcing everybody to move, even old static websites where potential impersonation and MITM attacks matter little, turned out not so painless as the advocates had proclaimed.
openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp
Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.