> That industry value would have surely multiplied
Nope. The industry warning and devaluing unencrypted connections was enabled by low cost configuration and zero cost issuance.
There is almost no chance that browser vendors would have proceeded with "deprecation" of unencrypted HTTP traffic without free issuers; the response from businesses would have been overwhelmingly negative.
Once you can figure out how to non-interactively renew those certs, it's fire and forget now.