I have mixed feelings about this.
On one hand, I agree with the technical merits. Having an automated process to renew short lived tls certs is “a good thing” and I think services like Let’s Encrypt have demonstrated such automation is viable (at large scale).
But, there are reasons why people pay money for tls Certs rather than use free (short lived) Certs. For example, there’s a mom-and-pop webhosting company that allows you to upload your tls Certs (they cost < $25 / year) or you can pay them $95 / year to use their Certs (and they just use Let’s Encrypt - lol)
The nearly 4x markup is their “convenience fee” or “dumb tax”. Regardless, once the 45 day tls Certs are enforced, I’ll have no choice in either paying their 4x markup or migrating to another platform.
… Having a choice is not always a bad thing…
I’m sorry this happened, but it seems rather reckless of the author to be running “Malicious PoCs” on their “daily driver” (re: the PC they use for everything).
If I was in the habit of running “Malicious PoCs”, you can be certain it would be isolated from the rest of my system. This could be in a sandbox or a vm. Heck, just created a dedicated (one time use) “new user” would have been better than "Hey, let me just download and run some random shell script. Oh, it needs root? No problem!