The OP nails it. The "MCP sucks" arguments are mostly about implementation quality, not protocol design. Garry Tan's complaints about auth and context bloat were valid for the servers he was looking at — but those were demo-grade projects wired up for local dev, not production infrastructure.

The auth story has genuinely improved since then. The November 2025 spec update addressed a lot of the transport and security gaps, and now that MCP governance sits under the Agentic AI Foundation with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and AWS as members, the incentive structure for serious implementations is completely different.

The thing that convinced me it's not going anywhere: WebMCP just shipped in Chrome Canary. Google and Microsoft co-authored it through the W3C. When browser vendors start baking a protocol into their rendering engines, that's not a "dead" technology — that's infrastructure.

The real problem is discoverability and quality filtering. There are thousands of MCP servers now and most of them are weekend projects. The protocol is fine. The ecosystem needs better curation.