This is a recent project. REST happened basically in the environment where your choices were CORBA, DCOM, SOAP and other such monstrosities.
Of course, REST won handily. We're not in this environment anymore, thankfully, and REST now is getting some well-deserved scrutiny.
> This is a recent project.
OData officially started out in 2007. Roy Fielding's thesis was published in 2000.
So it was a contemporary of Protobufs, Cap’n Proto, and other frameworks. Facebook had Thrift, Amazon had Coral, and so on.
They appeared almost simultaneously, for the very same reason: REST by itself is too vague and unreliable.