However, there’s still a privacy risk on a public wifi, correct? As in your neighbor can see the DNS requests (as those are generally unencrypted).
If you use a VPN, cool, but now your “free VPN” gets to see that.
The only other issues I could think of were ARP poisoning / spoofing and maybe local phishing redirects
I still see a good amount of clear text web traffic when I do packet captures in airports and the like.
Usually image or media files, but the odd time I see some badly conceived automatic update process pulling an exe or msi over plaintext HTTP.
In the real world is it embarrassing to have Emacs installed? Or KDE? Or even Tux Racer ? Probably not. But all things being equal we'd rather the program just kept this to itself right?
Not to mention the additional possibility of exploiting apt itself vs. having to exploit the TLS stack (which goes trough a lot more scrutiny).
Of all the places I'd avoid packet sniffing, that's high on the list.
HSTS helps with local phishing redirects, as the browser ought not load a 3xx request over http for sites with HSTS enabled.