Being able to directly connect to internal addresses from your local dev machine can have it's advantages. Consider the situation where you need to connect to services across a multitude of hosts in an internal network. Using static SSH tunnelling, mapping out each local port to remote host could be a challenge. You can run a SOCKS proxy through an SSH tunnel for dynamic port forwarding, but not everything supports SOCKS.
Another reason could be to bypass censorship / filtering for low volume web traffic websites. You may not trust a paid VPN service.
I've got two "jump boxes" running SSH accessible to 0/0. You can only SSH into any other hosts from one of those two and I do that dozens of times a day without even thinking about it.
It was a quick one-time set-it-up-and-forget-it (to configure "ProxyCommand" in ~/.ssh/config) kind of thing that just works.
Edit: maybe adminstration tasks for AWS? But then, isn't SSH okay for that?