For a public facing interface, I haven't really found REST to be lacking. Adherence to REST buys you simplicity and (if kept to the standards) some implicit understandability.

That said, REST is not the right fit for _every_ use case. The same simplicity mentioned as a strength also limits its flexibility. I think this is no more abundantly clear than microservice oriented architectures. More and more these architectures are moving towards different patterns/protocols for various reasons (gRPC comes to mind).