Literally everybody does SSH wrong. The point of host keys is to exchange them out-of-band so you know you have the right host on the first connection.
And guess what certificates are.
Also keep in mind that although MS and Apple both publish trusted root lists, Mozilla is also one of, if not the, biggest player. They maintain the list of what ultimately gets distributed as ca-certificates in pretty much every Linux distro. It’s also the source of the Python certifi trusted root bundle, that required by requests, and probably makes its way into every API script/bot/tool using Python (which is probably most of them).
And there’s literally nothing stopping you from curating your own bundle or asking people to install your cert. And that takes care of the issue of TOFU. The idea being that somebody that accepts your certificate trusts you to verify that any entity using a certificate you attach your name to was properly vetted by you or your agents.
You are also welcome to submit your CA to Mozilla for consideration on including it on their master list. They are very transparent about the process.
Hell, there’s also nothing stopping you from rolling a CA and using certificates for host and client verification on SSH. Thats actually preferable at-scale.
A lot of major companies also use their own internal CA and bundle their own trusted root into their app or hardware (Sony does this with PlayStation, Amazon does this a lot of AWS Apps like workspaces, etc)
In fact, what you are essentially suggesting is functionally the exact same thibg as self-signed certificates. And there’s absolutely (technically) nothing wrong with them. They are perfectly fine, and probably preferable for certain applications (like machine-to-machine communication or a closed environment) because they expire much longer than the 1yr max you can get from most public CAs. But you still aren’t supposed to TOFU them. That smacks right in the face of a zero-trust philosophy.
The whole point of certificates is to make up for the issue of TOFU by you instead agreeing that you trust whoever maintains your root store, which is ultimately going to be either your OS or App developer. If you trust them to maintain your OS or essential app, then you should also trust them to maintain a list of companies they trust to properly vet their clientele.
And that whole process is probably the number one most perfect example of properly working, applied, capitalism. The top-level CAs are literally selling honesty. Fucking that up has huge business ramifications.
Not to mention, if you don’t trust Bob’s House of Certificate’s, there’s no reason you can’t entrust it from your system. And if you trust Jimbo’s Certificate Authority, you are welcome to tell your system to accept certificates they issue.