My way of securely accessing HTTP-only sites these days is to check if the site's been archived. Not sure if it's changed since, but here's a snapshot of the page on Jan 11th 2025[0].

[0] https://archive.md/Q207v

That's actually a pretty good idea, thanks.

FWIW I'm a bit torn on this. I think most websites should host both HTTP/2/3 with TLS, but also plaintext HTTP/1.1 as a fallback.