Some companies force everything through a proxy. This is common with big telcos and banks. So even if you want to SSH into a machine from your workstation/desktop you probably want something like this. We used it for so much more though - because it's not just a proxy between your workstation - but there's many different bastion proxies situated all over the place isolating and guarding networks.

So at the end of the day it's really just a productivity tool like your calendar or email program, except this is used because corporate security is egregiously bad.

I think they are implying that the code of wrapping binary data up and going through an HTTP proxy might prove useful for another project.