@z428 I hear you. But I am afraid, you are looking at history with the advantage of hindsight here. When we were designing those technologies, we did not foresee a lot of accidental complexity in our designs.

So let's take a look at your example and let's find some KPI to measure "progress". Say adoption - be it in absolute numbers, or fraction of relevant industry players adopting the tech. Whichever way you cut it, REST has by far the highest adoption of the three and by that measure it's a great success, so it apparently does some things better then the predecessors (being familiar with CORBA specs 20 years ago, I'd say that another KPI to care about is the absolute weight of the printed specs in kg!)

So maybe another answer your question about what's the name of the phenomenon: "evolution"(?) As in: the evolution cannot solve the inherent complexity, but over time it manages to smooth out the accidental complexity involved which leads to greater adoption. And that sounds like a "Good Thing(TM)".

Better?