Very interesting, I hadn't heard of this obfuscation before so it was well worth clicking.

Another good trick for debugging ssh's exact behavior is patching in "None" cipher support for your test environment. It's about the same work as trying to set up a proxy but lets you see the raw content of the packets like it was telnet.

For terminal games where security does not matter but performance and scale does, just offering telnet in the first place can also be worth consideration.