I've witnessed a similar journey, having worked on an application 15 years ago that (for various reasons that made sense at the time) used RMI calls between a bunch of presentation logic and a service layer.

It was refactored into a J2EE application after 7 years, and is now being refactored into a group of microservices, which causes a number of the longer-lived devs in the team to suggest everything old is new again.