I was thinking websockets; though, I thought those largely hit the same criticisms? That is, tons of things moved to them specifically to avoid any firewall rules about what they were allowed to send over a network.
Arguably, this basic phenomenon has been going on for 20+ years. A lot of people by 2005-2007 or so had come to belive (and probably correctly) that a lot of the impetus for adopting SOAP based web-services over the preceding few years was simply because everything ran over ports 80 and 443 which were already open in the firewall. So deploying a remote service this way was more tractable than submitting a request to allow access to yet another port in firewall, and deal with the inevitable bureaucratic nightmare of getting that approved.
Arguably, this basic phenomenon has been going on for 20+ years. A lot of people by 2005-2007 or so had come to belive (and probably correctly) that a lot of the impetus for adopting SOAP based web-services over the preceding few years was simply because everything ran over ports 80 and 443 which were already open in the firewall. So deploying a remote service this way was more tractable than submitting a request to allow access to yet another port in firewall, and deal with the inevitable bureaucratic nightmare of getting that approved.