That is a fascinating question. Mostly because I wasn't around for SOAP. I started my development career kind of with the rise of REST. I've only ever used REST

That is a fascinating question. Mostly because I wasn't around for SOAP. I started my development career kind of with the rise of REST. I've only ever used REST personally, so I couldn't really tell you. Looking up WSDL, I can tell you one thing I've noticed with OpenAPI is that it is both incredibly descriptive, and yet not in the way. I can look at an OpenAPI file, figure out what is going really quickly and get working. With WSDL/XML you have to parse the whole XML schema to really understand what is going on.