In the hopes that it will help spread adoption of HTTPS, I wrote a web server that serves your sites over HTTPS by default, using Let's Encrypt: https://caddyserver.com - It also redirects HTTP -> HTTPS.[1] There's a lot of misinformation out there about certificates and HTTPS, but don't let it stop you from encrypting your site. Regardless of Google's move, there is no excuse for any site not to be served encrypted…
This is an awkward argument. One of my sites documents how to configure servers, for example. What excuse is there that something like that needs to be encrypted? The most legitimate reason I've heard is for privacy. I don't believe the gov't is going to lock someone up for learning how to serve web pages.
It'd be slightly nice if we were able to have integrity-protected HTTP without encryption (lower overhead, easier debugging with packet dumps), but the advantages are minimal (ciphers are not really the overhead, SSLKEYLOGFILE is a thing) and it's a lot of complexity to the web platform, which is a downside for web developers like you and me: the rules for mixed content between HTTP, HTTPI, and HTTPS are going to be much more involved and confusing.