As other have noted, someone caught on to the simplicity of RPC.

It always baffled me how so-called RESTful APIs became popular, despite virtually all of them being RPC APIs with a veneer of rather pointless HTTP semantics.

Virtually none of those APIs do anything to serve the intentions and goals behind REST[1]. Furthermore, many RESTful APIs end up being wrapped into language-specific clients anyway, because they have poor ergonomics in their raw state.

I consider RESTful APIs the most significant anti-pattern not widely recognized as such.

[1] https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arc...