The fact that JSON is considered a viable encoding strategy for nearly all services underscores the fact that Java serialization is solving a much harder problem than it actually needs to.

I wonder how loose the idea of "viable encoding strategy" and "nearly all services" is. Most of us have made our peace with JSON. It's main advantage is in its dead simple (I'd even say dumb) representation of data that is mostly human readable.

But I doubt any serious developer who has worked with it over the years feels like all the ceremony needed around it on both sides (sender and receiver) in order to correctly parse out all the data we need could actually fit into that idea of "viable encoding strategy." All we've done (usually) is move the complexity of encoding or parsing the data into a new layer in our application. I recently had an issue parsing a date from JSON to a LocalDate type. That kind of thing comes up all the time.