Why ever use HTTP over HTTPS? Is there still a valid reason? or In what scenarios would you ever use

Performance *can* be a thing in super high-traffic, low-latency scenarios. Think stock trading or gaming where every ms counts.

But yeah, modern hardware mostly negates the overhead. Unless you're Google-scale, it's probably not worth the trade-off.

Fun fact: Cloudflare's free TLS actually makes HTTPS faster than HTTP in some cases due to HTTP/2.