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It completely prevents passive surveillance, however. Sure, you can MITM, but the point is now to look at anything you have to do an MITM attack, unlike now, where most traffic is unencrypted and you can do surveillance passively. This makes surveillance more difficult. Net gain for everyone.

I'll concede that passive surveillance would not be possible. However, I think that benefit is marginal - AFAIK, unencrypted support in HTTP2 is optional and won't be supported by browsers in any case.

Non-authenticated TLS is trivially vulnerable to MITM attacks.

I don't think a well-implemented TOFU/POP policy would be "trivially vulnerable", but it would still accommodate self-signing. Standardizing this would have been a worthy goal for IETF.

I'd argue that even if it is MITM-vulnerable, it's still very useful, as it makes passive surveillance impossible.

This article has a great response to that argument: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/07/28/Privacy-E...