CP has always used the ```Puppet::Network::HttpPool.http_instance``` method to obtain HTTP connection objects. This method used to return the ```Net::HTTP``` objects before https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/commit/fa32691db3a7c2326118d528144fd1df824c0bb3.
The commit changed it to return objects of type ```Puppet::Network::HTTP::Connection```, which is actually convenient (it does all the SSL setup) when connecting to hosts which can be verified, but unusable (since currently there is is no way to disable the peer verification and thus this pull request) when connecting to hosts which cannot be verified.
Of, course CP could use the ```Net::HTTP``` and setup SSL itself, but in that case it would mostly duplicate the code in ```Puppet::Network::HTTP::Connection```.