Comment by Karrot_Kream

I think the "problem" of sending data is a lot harder without some concept of payloads and signaling. HTTP just happens to be the way that people do that but many RPCs like zeromsg/nng, gRPC, Avro, Thrift, etc work just fine. Plenty of tech companies use those internally.

Some of this is hurt by the fact that v8, Node's runtime, has had first class JSON parsing support in but no support for binary protocol parsing. So writing Javascript to parse binary protocols is a lot slower than parsing JSON.