@niconiconi Well there's things like JSON-RPC which can be over TCP/TLS but also WebSocket.
I'd say it's an improvement, sure it sucks for binary data but for those you can typically refer to an URL, even for livestreams (although I'd say DASH and HLS are quite cursed, specially with M3U files instead of a message-passing socket, but I guess that way it allows for full load-balancing).