Redis with Magento – stunnel?

I just inherited a Magento site (Adobe Commerce) that is really struggling performance wise. I’ve already found an issue with php-fpm max_children settings being ridiculously low (5) and optimizing that has helped a lot.

As I’m reviewing the architecture in general, I’ve found that the Redis server is being accessed through a local tunnel instead of directly. That is to say, a tunnel has been configured (without ssl) to hit the redis cache across a network, then the magento config uses localhost:port instead of the actual hostname to the redis server.

This seems like a needless additional step to me,, but wanted to check with the community here to understand if this is for some reason a Magento best-practice, of if you can think of any other reason this might be desirable?