Allegedly, on or about 11 August 2017, David A. De Graaf sent:
Why is ping more clever in finding the route?
It's a much more basic part of networking.
When you try to connect to a service (mail, HTTP, FTP, telnet, SSH, etc), it has to be there and running, and have nothing in the way (such as a firewall). It's something extra to the network, and behind the barrier, so to speak.
Ping is generally not firewalled. Though people can firewall that off, too, and completely stuff-up their ability to fault-find a network. Likewise with other ICMP traffic (firewalling it can break their networking, while doing nothing that helps with security).
Ping is usually part of the TCP/IP stack software. Ping tests help to confirm network presence, but are useless with confirming whether services are working. e.g. Doing ping www.example.com pings the network hardware and software at that location, it has no interaction with the webserver that it may be running.