I don't recall either CORBA or SOAP ever seeing enough penetration to look "eternal" as mainstream tech goes (obviously, and especially with SOAP, there's still plenty of enterprise use). Unlike XML and JSON.

They surely were, for anyone doing enterprise during the 2000's.

We had no plans to change to something else.

I recall a lot of talk about CORBA in early 00s, but I don't think I've actually ever seen it used anywhere outside of Gnome.

By late 00s, even the talk was more along the lines of it being legacy tech.

Several Nokia Networks products were based on CORBA, running on HP-UX, in a mix of C++ and Perl.

Eventually migrated to Java EE, also taking advantage of CORBA compatibility.

Q3 is still in C++. Huawei also still supports CORBA.

I hear you, but I am not aware of anyone that tried XMLHttpRequest.send('<s:Envelope xmlns:s...') or its '<methodCall>' friend from the browser. I think that's why they cited "of the web" and not "of RPC frameworks"

No, because that was server's job on the endpoint.

Eternal or not, right now JSON is used everywhere which means the performance gains of a more optimized Stalin would be significant. Just because we don’t know if JSON is around in 10 years doesn’t mean we should settle for burning extra compute on it.