My first real paid job was using CORBA to communicate from the Java applet running in the browser to the Java proxy running on the web server and then to an app server. Later I also worked with RMI, DCOM, etc.

I also used both DCOM and CORBA at later jobs for Soft-Realtime/Embedded distributed systems.

I’d say statically typed IDLs are much better than all these REST/HTTP/JSON/CRUD approach. That’s why I prefer GraphQL and gRPC/ProtoBuffers.

Not the least important thing is that having a statically-typed and well documented schema reduce the amount of required communication between the developers, and also reduces the number of misunderstandings, mistakes, and bugs.