The reality is that both are true - there was an "HTTP Object Model" that TBL and Roy Fielding had in mind in the 90s, but it was never formalized until Roy's thesis. Not everyone on the various IETF and W3C committees understood or agreed with it, clearly, and there are a lot of hacks in practice. There were attempts like HTTP-NG to supplant HTTP with CORBA-like Object RPC, but the arguments against this were basically informal arguments in favour of the uniform interface of URI + HTTP + MIME. Even today, the current HTML5 leads don't particularly seem to have much appreciation for the style.
That said, starting with the Apache web server, Roy had a lot of control with its architecture and approach to supporting particular HTTP features, using his mental model of the "Web's architectural style" to guide it. After 2000 and the thesis, there are many people that started implementing their clients and servers with the style as a philosophical guide.
The style also tends to be widely misunderstood and buzzword-ified, which is scammy.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that being a key contributor to Apache gave Fielding a huge amount of influence over the architectural style of web applications. The barn door on that was opened with CGI, and since then, the architecture of web applications mostly been up to the market and the lowest common denominator of programmers.
I was not referring to the internal architecture of web applications inside an origin server. I was referring to the architecture of a web application across the various components (agent, proxy, gateway, server), connectors (client, server, cache, resolver, tunnel), and data elements (resource, identifier, representation, metadata) in the style.
The architecture of those interactions has remained fairly stable over the past 15 years, even specs that route around REST like WebSockets are trying to at least adopt the HTTP upgrade & tunnel connector (HTTP CONNECT) to ensure it integrates consistently with the style.
That said, starting with the Apache web server, Roy had a lot of control with its architecture and approach to supporting particular HTTP features, using his mental model of the "Web's architectural style" to guide it. After 2000 and the thesis, there are many people that started implementing their clients and servers with the style as a philosophical guide.
The style also tends to be widely misunderstood and buzzword-ified, which is scammy.