If you build connectors for yourself or your team, you probably can skip MCP because you can tell your friends to install CLI or whatever and provide extra prompts for your CLI.

If you have external users, then you have to use MCP, which comes with how to use each endpoint and etc. MCP is what their current apps e.g. Cowork, Cursor support out-of-the-box.

In that sense, MCP is very much not dead