Is FTP really worse HTTP? If you try to enumerate directories over HTTP alarms start going off because you look like an attacker.
I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it.
Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to pass through firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsing of "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent. Need I continue? :)
Hard to get the full context, it was before my time: my beard may be grey now, but I'm not that old.
But you should use SFTP instead. This is SSH's replacement for FTP. It's not the same as FTPS which is useless.
We don't have to keep old protocols that offer nothing alive. Maybe a couple of clients and servers to demonstrate with, but it's a museum piece, not useful code. That's not an insult - museums are important. But we don't run Network Control Protocol (IPv1) on the internet, either.