I think it's more a matter of as programmer mature/learn, they overly disparage old code and idioms. It's not the new orthodoxy... I've seen in with RPC calls

I think it's more a matter of as programmer mature/learn, they overly disparage old code and idioms. It's not the new orthodoxy... I've seen in with RPC calls (hand-coded HTTP -> Hessian -> Protobufs), serialization languages (XML -> Json -> Protobufs/Bson), ad nauseam. I think this kind of changes is the natural state of multi-year development efforts. On a 10-15 years old code base, you'll see all sorts of things like that cropping up and it's incredibly hard to steer clear of these kinds of things. What are the alternatives? Wholesale replacement of all uses? Wasteful in resources! Not introducing new technologies? Offends the sensibilities of the devs...