May be somewhat of a philosophical argument if you are limiting it to viewing the content of packets. However, there is still a ton of data that can be leaked that could be considered sensitive - volume of transactions, where they are routing from/to, the frequency distribution of that volume. Also, there is also the possibility for manipulation of transmissions - blocking/dropping them altogether causing service outages/censorship, delay/deprioritization that could affect markets, etc. At the nation-state level, this provides a lot of useful opportunities for bad actors.

TLS isn't sufficient. There was at least one country, Kazakhstan, which had a plan to force all of its citizens to install their own CA to MITM all SSL traffic. (I'm not sure if the plan ever got implemented because the original government press release now 404's).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/kazakhstan-considers-p...

There are a lot of information in requests metadata. For example, even without accessing any encrypted data you can identify:

1. Client (user IP).

2. Service (server IP).

3. Amount of traffic.

4. Direction of traffic.

4. Just watching timestamps, you can identify patterns that will give you information on what type of content user is accessing (e.g. if you are oppression nation state, and want to know who watched or reshared a certain video on youtube, you can get that purely from requests patterns, mainly timestamps). By correlating those timestamps with others, you can identify user's friends/collaborators, or other identities they use.

What if TLS traffic is recorded. Future technology may be able to decrypt it. Your secrets may be out later.

If you could avoid certain pipes it could only help security. Even with the security of TLS, that doesn't prevent state-level actors from observing meta data with the advantage of internet-wide timing data, which could be useful for say, analyzing TOR traffic.

Not a crypto expert but doesn't trusting TLS imply trusting root certs on your PC? Regardless, the Snowden leaks showed that internet traffic can be modified to contain harmful payloads for targeted individuals. Even if only susceptible over non-TLS it still represents a non-zero percentage of internet traffic.