Correct - I made this point in my comment earlier - a bit part of this is the difference between DOP and OOP, and how similar technologies can be used for either style of integration. (SOAP is one of them that I have a lot of experience with - you can do RPC-over-SOAP or REST-over-SOAP, with vastly different results).

And a similar pattern can also be seen with ORMs: the notion of objects has proven less helpful, leading many developers to prefer the query builder and dataframe approach instead.

Exactly right - the data-first (or contract-first for APIs) is a better abstraction barrier than object-first (or data + code mixed together). Most query languages respect this, and when they do not, it usually ends up being a dead end. That includes ideas like embedded a JVM in an Oracle SQL database or various NoSQL systems that have tried embedding Javascript or other general purpose programming languages.