Its not a benefit for public nodes, its a huge detriment. Its not possible to cache the large request, it must be parsed and unpacked. REST absolutely can match the "efficiency" by utilizing https/2 and async & parallel programming on the client side.
The result is cache friendly server behaviour and excellent client performance.
Further, rate limiting is much harder when someone tries to batch 100 fat account history requests. Its much easier to do this with parallel requests.