Fielding won the war precisely because he was intellectually incoherent and mostly wrong. It's the "worse is better" of the 21st century.

RPC systems were notoriously unergonomic and at best marginally successful. See Sun RPC, RMI, DCOM, CORBA, XML-RPC, SOAP, Protocol Buffers, etc.

People say it is not RPC but all the time we write some function in Javascript like

   const getItem = async (itemId) => { ... }

which does a

   GET /item/{item_id}

and on the backend we have a function that looks like

   Item getItem(String itemId) { ... }

with some annotation that explains how to map the URL to an item call. So it is RPC, but instead of a highly complex system that is intellectually coherent but awkward and makes developers puke, we have a system that's more manual than it could be but has a lot of slack and leaves developers feeling like they're in control. 80% of what's wrong with it is that people won't just use ISO 8601 dates.