[Crysstalis]

>not dbus

In practice D-Bus is functionally similar to many other IDL schemes and can be trivially tunneled over SSH. But yes, it has mostly become used for local applications to communicate with system daemons, and the networked case is not particularly relevant.

The modern replacement for networked objects is to write a web server and communicate using XMLHttpRequest/fetch/websockets, which is outside the scope of a desktop environment.