About all I gleaned from reading it was a big list of reasons why 'RESTful' is bad, and that the main solution was to use HTTP(s) as purely a transport layer.

What, exactly the 'solution' will look like depends on future posts... however https://xkcd.com/927/ (Standards) comes to mind.

Is it so strange? XML-RPC is simpler ancestor of SOAP. JSON-RPC is a superset of XML-RPC (includes e.g. named parameters), defined over JSON instead of XML. JSON-RPC doesn't have the wide spread of XML-RPC, though.

I don't see much wrong with those, and they do much better than REST, since they already have well-defined way of signaling errors.