I still use WSDLs, or rather the platform I work on does. Maybe not popular for new tech but they are still alive. Hate me, but I’d rather have generated xml than generate yaml.
WSDL issue was that it was designed by a committee of several huge companies. So it was inconsistent and bloated. Same could be said about many XML-related standards.
Nowadays big companies rarely work together and prefer to throw their own solutions to the market, hoping to capture it. That results in a higher quality approaches, because it's developed by a single team and focused on a single goal, rather than trying to please 10 vendors with their own agendas.
> SOAP was designed as an object-access protocol and released as XML-RPC in June 1998 as part of Frontier 5.1 by Dave Winer, Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein for Microsoft, where Atkinson and Al-Ghosein were working. The specification was not made available until it was submitted to IETF 13 September 1999. [1]
WSDL 1.0's list of editors reads [2]:
> Erik Christensen, Microsoft; Francisco Curbera, IBM; Greg Meredith, Microsoft; Sanjiva Weerawarana, IBM
IOW, TypeScript is by the same company as SOAP and WSDL.
> Nowadays big companies rarely work together [...] That results in a higher quality approaches