Completely agree here. I think many people realize this and have built awesome tooling to be able to manage different ecosystems and environments.
One that I've been particularly keen on over the last year is GraphQL. If you're interested in simplifying frontend development while giving it more power and control to dictate the data that it needs for each component / view, you should check out GraphQL. I know what you're thinking... "Ugh, another dev tool to learn etc etc". But it's definitely one that's here the stay and a bigger idea than even REST itself. The OPEN STANDARD of it is KEY.
The idea is that you have a type system on the API level and one endpoint. And querying works using a standard GraphQL language, so it's cross-API compatible and you don't need to go learn a whole new API convention at each new place or project you're working on since with REST, they're probably all built in different ways. And GraphQL works across all platforms (i.e. no more proprietary SDKs). All you need are things like Relay and Apollo and that's it.
I've actually been working on a platform called Scaphold.io (https://scaphold.io) to help people learn more about GraphQL and give them a cleanly packaged server and help you manage your data so you don't have to in order to feel the benefits of GraphQL right off the bat. Because of the use of GraphQL, it comes with the best of both worlds of Parse and Firebase with awesome data modeling tools, real-time capabilities, and of course it's built on an open standard.
Truly is the future of APIs that works perfectly with React, and any other framework that comes out down the road for that matter. Facebook's tooling is really neat cause it's built from first principles as well as from their experience running one of the largest distributed systems in the world. So they definitely know a thing or two about building developer tools that are cross-platform compatible and developer-friendly.