Okay let's say you want to ping a Minecraft server and see how many users are online. That's not possible either with telnet.
The concept of protocols made up of printable characters delimited by new lines is antiquated.
The concept of protocols made up of printable characters delimited by new lines is antiquated.
All of those problems have different root causes and therefore have different solutions. Telnet helps you figure out where in the stack the failure is occurring.