> My beef is how Google forces this change on everyone, but at the same time haven't the balls to shake things up and make SSL easily available for everyone.

Really? https://letsencrypt.org/ Chrome is listed amongst the major sponsors.

I don't even use, or have much love for, LetsEncrypt as it happens because it was a PITA to set up with node when I tried it. But even without that getting and using a certificate issued by Cloudflare was easy.

Creating a self-signed certificate for dev and test is also pretty easy. It just takes a handful of commands in bash: http://www.akadia.com/services/ssh_test_certificate.html. It's the work of literally 5 minutes.