Software lives forever. You have to take the long view, not the "rn" view. In the long view, NFS's XDR or ASN.1 are just fine and could have been enough, if we didn't keep reinventing things.
Probably the biggest challenge with something like XDR is it's very hard to maintain tooling around it long-term. Nobody wants to pay for forty years of continuous incremental improvement, maintenance, and modernization.
Long term this churn will hopefully slow down, it's inevitable as we collectively develop a solid set of "engineering principles" for the industry.
And yet somehow, we are willing to pay to reinvent the thing 25 times in 40 years.
I'm actually super excited to see how https://www.sovereign.tech turns out long-term. Germany has a lot of issues with missing the boat on tech, but the sovereign tech fund is such a fantastic idea.