I suspect people who commonly look at the older or weirder parts of the Internet will get used to the "not secure" warning. If you don't care enough to fix it, you probably don't care much about growing a mainstream audience anyway.

"Not secure" doesn't mean you have to shut it down, it just means it's not secure.

This is part of a trend of gradually increasing production values for mainstream sites; it makes the less polished stuff look dated, but in a way that's just going back to the old days when the Internet was an obscure place with a small audience.