SSH is not overkill, it is the default. There are some narrow circumstances where you might have a good reason to use telnet in 2023, but they are edge cases related to legacy hardware and possibly occasionally the desire for easy on-path interception. It is very unlikely that you have a good reason to not just use SSH. Even if you care nothing about the security advantages, SSH has more consistent and better-defined behavior around 8-bit data, and offers far more features.