It's true that you miss out on "telnet example.com 80" and typing "GET /", but that honestly hasn't been valid since HTTP/1.1 replaced HTTP/1.0. To some extent this all sounds to me like "I hate screws, they render my trusty hammer obsolete". That's true, but there are also great screw driving tools.
You could still do valid HTTP/1.1 over nc or telnet, or 'openssl s_client' if you needed TLS; it was just a matter of you knowing the protocol, and the minimum required headers for your use-case. (That said, curl is generally a better choice.)
It's true that you miss out on "telnet example.com 80" and typing "GET /", but that honestly hasn't been valid since HTTP/1.1 replaced HTTP/1.0. To some extent this all sounds to me like "I hate screws, they render my trusty hammer obsolete". That's true, but there are also great screw driving tools.