There are plenty of organizations and individuals that can competently run ssh directly on the internet (on port 22) with zero risk to "ssh scanners."
I am just pointing out (also in few other, off-site discussions), that one should not even think of exposing a port before finishing locking it down.
Because sometimes people forget, even experienced people (including myself), and sometimes that's enough (I think someone few weeks ago submitted a story which involved getting pwned through accidentally exposed postgres?).
And there's enough people who get it wrong for various reasons that lowest of low script kiddies can profit buying ready-made extortion kits on chinese forums, getting a single VM with windows to run them, and extort money from gambling/gameserver sites. Not to mention all the fun stuff if you search for open VNC/RDP.
And those people told him the install system didn't support SSH keys (hindsight: they did) and got him to make the root logins possible with passwords. Passwords that weren't particularly hard to guess because their only expected and planned use was for the other team to login for the first time and set their own, before the machines were to be exposed to internet, using BMC.
Few days after they asked to redirect an entire subnet to their rack.
And yes, you still need to remember to close password logins or at least pick serious password if you need them. Helps to have no root login over SSH and normal users that aren't defaults for some distro...