By way of comparison, it has never been a good idea to default to HPKP. Privacy-sensitive sites should be pinned, and if you can't safely manage pinning, that's a pretty good sign that you're not mature enough to engineer privacy for the site either, so I don't have that much sympathy for the argument that it's a foot cannon (this is, of course, very easy for me to say). But if you're just selling coffee beans or scheduling laundry pickups, PKP has always been a very bad idea for you.
The latter example is where HSTS becomes an invaluable tool, since now the only way those resources could be delivered is through a trusted channel, verified by the PKI. The same value is not there for a software mirror, because of the other security safeguards already implemented, removing the need to trust the delivery channel. That said, most still do server their content over HTTPS as well.
It will backfire when the certificate expires, when some clients don't recognize the CA chain, when domains or subdomains don't match the certificate.