Modern SOAP doesn't sound too bad to me! But then again, I never found SOAP to be all that bad.
I might have been lucky, though. Every time I had to use SOAP, it was just a matter of auto generating a client interface in whatever language I happened to be working in and then proceeding from there. I suppose not everyone was so fortunate.
I found that autogeneration rarely worked well unless the client and the server were using the same tooling.
The monstrous flexibility of xml and soap meant that in practice every soap server interface I had to consume had some quirk or incompatibility with the client I was trying to use.
I might have been lucky, though. Every time I had to use SOAP, it was just a matter of auto generating a client interface in whatever language I happened to be working in and then proceeding from there. I suppose not everyone was so fortunate.