In a recent book, which I learned from a podcast[1], Lant Pritchett argues that much of the increase of education in developing countries is to a great extent fake, being inflated by governments which "have created all the appearances of schools that provide education but without actually doing it " by producing "enrollment statistics, numbers of buildings, numbers of toilets, numbers of textbooks, numbers of everything (...) all of which can project the image that there's a functional system and providing real learning there."

I think a similar effect has happened to RESTful architectures; people making them have (inadvertently, I believe) produced very convincing emulations while skipping the parts that effectively distinguish them from RPC systems.

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/lant_pritchett.html