NO

Comedy can be staged and still be funny. It’s acting.

That’s not how spaghetti western is supposed to be

Try putting -vvv when you connect and see what’s happening. I can imagine this happening if you have multiple identities (private/public key pairs) on the client and you hit a max retry limit. Pub key is always tried first, and it should ask for password once all the local keys have been tried.

Which distro?

Of course it’s KT.