It is both protocol decay as well as "misconception" in the way Rich Hickey meant in his Hammock Driven Development talk.
The longer such practices are allowed to exist, the more inertia and reluctance to there is to come to better practices, and the question about evolution is again Im Frage.
"Look we all have bio profile processors in our apps, and now you are telling us to drop that, just to make it look more like activitypub? We can see that it may be an improvement, but this is a past station now."