QUIC would be the end of the free internet if it ever "took over" but luckily it won't. It's not built to do so, it's only built for corporate use cases.
QUIC implementations do not allow for anyone to connect to anyone else. Instead, because it was built entirely with corporate for-profit uses cases in mind and open-washed through the IETF, the idea of a third party coporation having to authenticate the identity of all connections is baked in. And 99.999% of QUIC libs, and the way they're shipped in clients, cannot even connect to a server without a third party corp first saying they know the end point and allow it. Fine for corporate/profit use cases where security of the monetary transactions is all that matters. Very much less fine for human uses cases where it forces centralization and easy control by our rapidly enshittifying authoritarian governments. QUIC is the antithesis to the concept of the internet and it's robustness and routing around damage.
I guess you are referring to the TLS requirement? I guess I could see how on a more restrictive platform like a phone you could conceivably be prevented from accepting alternate CAs or self signed certificates.
Huh, I never knew, I've been using QUIC on my Raspberry Pi's web server for years... Did I unknowingly go corporate!?
Even if you don't want to get a Letsencrypt certificate, you can always use a self-signed one and configure your clients to trust it on first use or entirely ignore it.
SSH also uses "mandatory host keys", if you think about it. It's really not a question of the protocols but rather of common client libraries and tooling.
There's a fairly far a long draft for replacing webrtc's SCTP with QUIC for doing p2p work. It doesn't seem to have any of these challenges, seems to be perfectly viable there for connecting peers. https://github.com/w3c/p2p-webtransport
Alas alas, basically stalled out, afaik no implementation. I wish Microsoft (the spec author) or someone would pick this back up.
WebRTC wraps SCTP in DTLS, so the "great challenge of encryption" has never been a problem there.
It just uses self-signed certificates, which is maybe conceptually slightly clunky compared to "pure" anonymous TOFU, but allows reusing existing stacks.
QUIC implementations do not allow for anyone to connect to anyone else. Instead, because it was built entirely with corporate for-profit uses cases in mind and open-washed through the IETF, the idea of a third party coporation having to authenticate the identity of all connections is baked in. And 99.999% of QUIC libs, and the way they're shipped in clients, cannot even connect to a server without a third party corp first saying they know the end point and allow it. Fine for corporate/profit use cases where security of the monetary transactions is all that matters. Very much less fine for human uses cases where it forces centralization and easy control by our rapidly enshittifying authoritarian governments. QUIC is the antithesis to the concept of the internet and it's robustness and routing around damage.