Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTP is still pretty much alive in research as well (well, until now). I also used it in the past week. I understand it has flaws, but... I don't know, this seems yet another nail in the Old Web coffin.
"Has flaws" is an understatement. FTP does not play well with the current way the web is set up. Any firewalling or NAT is a pain unless you have the firewall introspect the FTP commands, which is easy for plain FTP because it's plain text and unencrypted , but once you start encrypting the transport it gets more complex, and you need to add support for that in the firewall. There's also often two connection channels…
That is true only for active mode FTP. Firefox (and many other clients) already used passive mode FTP by default, which passes through NATs and firewalls just fine without need for special help.