I think the reverence it gets is owed to people desperately wanting to follow a standard when it comes to offering an HTTP API. You want to make it as easy (=standardized) as possible to use it, and REST has emerged as a viable standard.
I think the ease of use isn’t just about being standardized, it’s also about being simple. REST (in)famously doesn’t support higher-level concepts like transactions neatly, but it provides the magic four database operations if you only need to work with a single resource at once, and for many applications that is sufficient.
